


If I'm Reborn

by linkzeldi



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: F/M, Garden Child, M/M, Revival fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-11-24 20:31:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 100,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18169574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linkzeldi/pseuds/linkzeldi
Summary: // I hope nobody mourns me.Six years after the ending of Tokyo Ghoul, Koori Ui discovers Hazuki Hajime who he previously thought dead is still alive and connected to a murder in the academy. Koori descends into the dark side of the TSC, and the former CCG in order to discover the secrets of the Sunlit Garden.At the same time, Arima Yusa on his birthday discovers Rikai's favorite type of flower left on the balcony of the Quinx Manor. He chases ghosts in his own investigation that Squad Zero may still be alive due to one of Dragon's miracles.After six years of longing and mourning the losses of what was most precious to them, will Yusa and Ui really be in time to save anyone? Or are they six years too late.A reflection on death, the fate of the garden children, and second chances at life.





	1. Catcher in the Rye

**Author's Note:**

> Ui discovers a sassy and lost child at the TSC academy.

“This time you be the ghoul and I’ll be the investigator.”  
“Awe, but I always have to be the ghoul.”

The sound of children playing and laughing in the background never sounded so melancholy to Koori Ui before.

Koori Ui was lingering on the edge of a crime scene. Oh, but he was instructed by his boss to call it an incident. Dressed in a black button up collared shirt, with a vest tightly hugging his slender and feminine frame one could even say he had a noir air about his appearance. Especially since he had left the crime scene to go take a smoke.

Apparently, it was acceptable to show the orphaned primary and middle school up children that the academy took in the grisly crime scenes that were left from ghoul victims and dragon orphans, and teach them kendo and quinque usage from a young age but if he smoked in front of them he was being ‘a bad influence.’

Thirty-five-year-old Koori Ui’s hobbies were karaoke alone, going drinking alone, scrapbooking old pictures of himself and his time at the academy fifteen years ago, and sometimes instead of lighting his smoke right away he lit the match and let it burn down to his fingers just to feel a pinprick of something.

Last year in a bright room lit by blue-tinted fluorescent lights a doctor told him his habit of smoking was likely the cause of a tumor they had found in his stomach. That he would need to quit right away and take a leave off of absence from his work to undergo chemo. He declined them and went back to work. He told the doctor some foppish lie about how he did not want to risk the side effects to his hair, but the real reason was if he was going to die, rotting from the inside out slowly and then suddenly keeling over one day without even telling anybody beforehand seemed the ideal way to go. That was what his teacher had chosen anyway. Besides, there was no way he could quit smoking or this job. It was not that he even particularly liked cigarettes anymore, they tasted like he was swallowing oil and smelled even worse. He just liked doing things that killed him slowly.

Earlier this morning he had been called all the way to the fourth ward due to an ‘incident’, he was just glad because it allowed him to avoid being harassed by Tanakamaru, which seemed to be what passed for his social interaction nowadays. The man in the clean and sharp striped vest looked to be a complete and total contrast to the crime scene he had stepped in. Tokage’s entire body had swollen up, which implied that it had been days before anybody discovered his body. Well, Ui thought it was more accurate that it was day’s before it was reported. Everybody going about their daily lives with a stinky, swollen corpse with flies buzzing about it like it was the lord of the flies straight from hell present with them and just ignoring it until it became too hard to ignore seemed like usual TSC procedure. Blood had been splattered across not only the walls behind Tokage, but also on the windows, and a dried trail was baked onto the floor. The blood and guts and the body as well were all baked by the summer heat to smell like hell itself.  
Ui knew though as clean and tidy as he looked right now, the bloody scene in front of him was where he belonged. He wondered if the day would ever come that he would end up a corpse like that, stabbed by some kid’s short-sighted vengeance. Now that he thought about it he had probably made plenty of orphans. But, a quick death like that would probably be too merciful for him.

Having seen blood, bodies torn apart, and even bodies with the same cold and distant look in their eyes that Tokage’s had, and sneering with their tongue hanging out even in death to give one final insult to the world, it was not like Ui was particularly affected by the crime scene prompting his need to smoke. Rather, it was because he noticed how little he felt about it that he wanted to smoke. Even this morning when he got a call about an incident, his first response was not worrying that someone had died but rather what a pain, having to drive all the way to the fourth ward. He treated it with the same annoyance that he did brushing off Tanakamaru.

He wondered when did it happen. He never considered himself to be the ideal noir detective, one man seeking justice and truth in an unfair world, but he once believed such a thing as justice existed. The same way that smoking constantly had dulled his sense of smell, and dulled his tongue to the point that everything tasted like ash eventually he wondered what had dulled his sensibilities. Yet, he could not let go of cigarettes either. Because of that phrase that kept echoing in the back of his head. What a pain. Living was painful. Dying was also painful. So, noncommittally he shuffled between the two. He had ambition once, but it turns out learning everything you were working towards in your life that you believed was right was just a lie snuffed that out like the dying embers of a cigarette in an ashtray.

Koori returned to the scene. Despite his cold detective like persona, there was actually little to no detective work to do today, the student had already turned himself in. Ui wondered if surrounding himself with death like this had been a choice on his part. Even in his escape from the front lines as he was no longer able to bring himself to be a special class officer of the CCG, sorry, TSC, death had followed him here. His friend Hirako Take had gone to live with his grandparents and took over their funeral home after they passed. He had already started to bald, possessing a full shiny forehead, perhaps like Take his current lethargy was old age coming for him.

In a room, one hallway away from the murder scene, the culprit, or the student rather was waiting to be interviewed. Ui wondered why they were keeping him detained so close to the scene, it seemed like it would only upset the kid more. Then again they were probably trying to keep this incident as contained as possible, more important than the fact that it was dealt with was that it was all kept behind closed doors.

He had no idea what kind of kid was waiting for him on the other side of the door. In the past, he used to think that the only person that could ever take a life was someone completely divorced from their humanity. Now he thought that you only needed to think you were right to kill someone, and in that vein, anybody could become a killer. The entirety of humanity could be waiting for him on the other side of the door… that was a little too dramatic. He opened up the door slowly to see it was just some kid.

Ui brushed a hand through his shiny black bob. Just as there were some people who joined the army and self-defense forces to kill, there were some people who joined the academy because it gave them a license to be as violent as they wanted against an enemy, Kijima and Mado came to mind. He thought maybe one of the older students got overeager with the idea of killing ghouls and dragon children and turned a blade against their teacher. The kid waiting for him on the other side of the table with his head down was barely twelve. Not even a teenager yet.

Tanaka Taro gave his name. A name that could be found anywhere in Japan. Yes, this kid was no different from anybody else, except he lost his parents to violence, came to this school that was supposed to be a safe haven for him and then got into an altercation with his teacher which ended with his stabbing.

His name might not have even been Taro. A name like that was the equivalent of the American “John Doe.” Since almost all of the students taken into this level of the academy were orphans, sometimes names were changed, or family registries lost and misfiled. Ui heard that a lot now. Sloppy paperwork. For instance six years ago when he inquired about the fate of the Oggai and whether they should publicize the details of what had happened to a significant amount of the children the CCG took in, he had been told that the family registers for all of those children had been lost, and the most likely culprit behind the missing information was Furuta.

Furuta, he had misfiled paperwork even after he was already dead? How considerate of him. Ui did not remember what he said at the time to the clerk, just that he had experienced a particularly strong craving for a cigarette. That was the same as an emotion, right?

The child’s hair was so long, it was knotted. His hair covered his face and obscured one of his eyes. He held his head down and his fingers gripped the side of his chair. He muttered again and again. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go, this isn’t how it was supposed to go…”

“Well generally, you know a situation has gone wrong if a dead body pops up,” Ui said. Even working at a school for six years he had no idea how to talk to a child, what a joke. To think six years ago he applied for this position because of the only happy time…

Yeah, the only happy time in his life he could remember was when he was gently nurturing and raising up another to succeed him.

 

“Koori-senpai.”

He tried to force a smile for the benefit of that kid. His smiling muscles were so unused, cobwebs had built up underneath his skin, and he could hear them creak.

“Listen, it’s not like I can give a slap on the wrist to murder…” Though he had seen plenty of people getting away with it before, himself included, “But, I need to hear your side of the story if I’m going to help you.”

He had been told stories about average faced Tanaka from the moment he approached the crime scene. The rumors of the cat-killer had started up again. Apparently, there was one every generation, first Juuzou, then Mutsuki, and then finally Tanaka. He was told that it was a matter of time before Tanaka snapped and moved on to humans. That he had a predisposition towards violence.

Ui had to fight himself from rolling his eyes. As if a predisposition towards violence was a disqualification for recruitment to the CCG, sorry, TSC. He dropped a plastic baggy on the table, inside of it was a simple boxcutter knife whose blade had been sharpened. “Where did you find this?”

The kid broke out from his muttering to stare at it. “It’s not mine.”

“Then who gave it to you?”

“...” Silent again.

“It’s no use protecting them. Anybody who gives you a knife to kill someone with isn’t your friend. They’re not helping you.”

If he was a proper teacher Ui would teach that lesson to every kid here.

“He was! He was the only one that helped me! Everybody else just looked down on me and called me cat-killer and problem-child.”

“Do you know who was really causing the cat killings?” Ui said as he looked at the child. When they refused to make eye contact, he turned a chair around and sat in it lowering his head until their gazes caught each other. “Did somebody else blame you for them?”

“You won’t believe me. Nobody else did.”

“Well, if the common way of thinking is to not believe a child then I have even more reason to believe you.” Be more proper. Be more like everybody else. That was how he had been raised. And that was one of the many insults he shouted and lectured at both Hairu and Arima. Now he wondered what he wanted them to be like when he told them to be like everybody else, selfish and lazy. Ui stood up once more and reached across the table, pressing his hand on the kids head. Sometimes all a kid wants is a pat on the head so why not give it to them.

“He… he said it would all go okay if I took that knife and stabbed sensei the next time we had one of our private sessions. He said if I moved the body to the river by the woods at night, he’d be able to get rid of it for me and nobody would know.”

“Private sessions?”

“Sensei he… he forced me to meet with him alone.”

“When did this start happening?”

“There was a kitten that I fed every day after school. He looked exactly like the cat my parents used to keep. Kittens aren’t allowed in the dormitories so I thought it was fine as long as I fed him outside. But then one day I saw, in the middle of the night, Sensei took a knife and then… just like my parents… his insides were supposed to be inside of him.”

“...”

“Then afterward Sensei told me I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what I saw, nobody would believe me. That was when they all started calling me the cat killer because I had been sneaking out of my dorm at night to feed the kitten.”

“...”

“Then, he started demanding I meet with him in private. He gave me a knife, and put a cat right in front of me and said he wouldn’t let me go until I killed it. When I threw the knife away...he… he hit me.”

“Did you report him after that point?”

“I showed another teacher the bruise, but they said that they could only report it to management.” The kid finally broke down under the warmth of Ui’s hands, and he heard the sound of tears. Ui wondered how many tears the kid had swallowed just to make it to this point.  
“ I… I just wanted to… I just wanted to protect that little kitten. I didn’t know… I didn’t know all of this and then I just wanted it to stop.”

“I understand how you feel. There was somebody that I wanted to protect once too.”

He was management and he had heard nothing about any of Tokage’s activities. Yet, other teachers who were present had been quick to jumping on and blaming the kid. Koori only had one final question.

“The person who gave you this knife what was their name.”

“They said they didn’t have a name. They had one once but they lost it.”

“Then what did you call them?”

“Nezumi...c-cuz, you wouldn’t name a rat.”

What kind of cool joker is this? That’s not even true people name pet rats. Koori Ui thought but did not say. He stayed there for a long time, simply holding the kids head and pressing it against his chest, not knowing what else to do. Until the sounds of his crying and choked up tears, and his violent hiccups, eventually softened down.

 

💀

Ui recommended they relinquish custody of the child and call protective services to see what they would recommend for psychiatric care after what the child had been through. Years ago he had taken to this job with a passion and suggested an overhaul on the way they dealt with children taken in from ghoul attacks, including mandatory therapy as well as education and cutting all education about ghouls.

His plan was delayed again and again from being putting it into action for five years due to a claimed lack of budget. Ui thought if they lacked the budget to properly take care of children they should not take them in in the first place. Oddly enough though, most of Ui’s requests were backed up due to paperwork and budgetary reasons, but a recent proposal to teach quinque handling one year earlier had gotten through in less than a month despite Ui being the voice opposing it.

He could ask around why he heard nothing of Tokage too, but he already knew what his position was. The TSC had been restructured to give the appearance of change, that was why they had assigned a trustworthy looking veteran like Ui with a good record to the place of the vice chair to give the appearance that it was in good hands and working towards reform.

Kijima once told him he would worry more about himself if he had a pretty face like Ui. Ui never thought his pretty face would actually get him a promotion when he heard it at the time.

Tokage was a former prison warden who had a habit of torturing the ghouls under his care to the point of insanity, long after they had given up any useful information. One day a ghoul retaliated against him and tortured him before escaping. Afterward, he was reassigned. To Ui it looked like a clear case of someone abusing their position merely to be violent, not someone who was genuinely interested in public safety. The common sense approach would have been to fire him, but instead, the CCG kept Tokage on the paycheck and put him around children. The same way the CCG kept Mado, the same way the CCG kept Kijima. He had heard the same story, again and again, Mado is vicious towards ghouls but he’s a nice guy to be around when you get to know him.  
Nice people weren’t capable of such a thing. That was what Ui had once thought, but then he realized more and more with age that yes, they were. Still, there was no reason to keep employing Tokage, the common sense move would have been to fire him and cut all ties with him.

The CCG, no sorry the TSC, however, must have had more paperwork errors that prevented the message that Tokage was a danger to his students from going up the chain of command. That wasn’t just bureaucracy, that was Kafkaesque.

In the trial, a man is sentenced to death for an absurd crime. He attempts time and time again to prove his innocence but the complexity of bureaucracy made him give in. He was so exhausted he was probably happy to die by that point.

Ui considered a moment bringing up why no action had been taken against Tokage, but he already had an inkling as to why. The CCG, no sorry the TSC wanted these children to become ghoul investigators, they wanted them to become violent, so they had them taught by a violent man. Tokage put a knife into the hand of Taro because that was symbolically what the CCG, no sorry the TSC wanted with him.

As he thought all of these case details over, Ui was standing near a river near the end of the campus just as the sun was about to go down. A large forested section was where the stray cats roamed. Ui had seen a few of them walk by in the time he had been waiting.

Perhaps this school had a rat problem at one time. Then they brought in a few cats as pest control, only for the stray cat population to get out of control. Perhaps that was the real reason they brought Tokage in, pest control.

Anyway, it was good that the cats had cleared out of this area a while ago, as Ui was waiting for a rat to show up. If Taro was not going to meet him tonight, then Ui decided to meet with the stranger that had handed him the knife.

Even if nobody else seemed to care about the particular details of this case, just that it never reaches the public ears, Ui was going to see it through to the end.

Then, when the moon was at its highest point in the sky he saw a shadow appear. It was the reverse of the Cheshire cat, the first thing he saw was a pure white smile stepping out of the darkness, then the rest of his body became visible.

“Come on special class Ui. What’s with that face? It’s like you’re looking at a ghost. Lol.”

“That’s because I am looking at a ghost.”

 

He had not been expecting anything at all, there were plenty of people with a grudge against the CCG that might want to turn a child’s problem into a bigger incident, and he did not expect much these days in general. Not expecting anything, he still was surprised.

Standing in front of him was a boy with ratty hair, so long and overgrown it covered his face. Two eyes as dark and lifeless as cold were looking at him, peeking from between his bangs, and then that smile. Posthumously, when he had been digging around for information on the Oggai, he had only found one single picture, the picture was stained and photograph damaged like someone was trying to get rid of it.

Hajime Hazuki, the boy from the photograph stood right in front of him. His face had changed slightly, he was older, but from the way he spoke, and the way he smiled it was definitely him.

“Hazuki Hajime.”

“Don’t you know? That kid’s been missing in action since dragon.”

“MIA? I thought you were filed as dead with the rest of the oggai.”

That kid shook his head furiously, causing his hair to go every which way. “No, no, that’s no good, Special Class. Could you imagine the kind of press the CCG would receive if it approved of a fighting force of one hundred children who all died on one mission?”

“It’s the TSC now.”

“Mmm…” Casually, like he was talking to an old friend but that wasn’t possible because that boy did not have a single friend in the world Hajime folded his arms behind his head. “Just like that, I’m not Hajime anymore, I’m Nezumi now. I’m the rat that snickers in the shadows.”

“And what… steals our cheese?”

“No! That’s not it! Only mice do that and that’s not nearly as cool.”

Hajime Hazuki, thirteen, he believed the message that the CCG was right and here to bring justice to orphaned children like him, in particular, he wanted justice for his parents. His parents had been weaker than the ghouls that killed him, that was why he wanted to be stronger than any ghoul. He worshipped Haise Sasaki, a human who attained more power than any ghoul and used it to kill ghouls en masse. Haise had a higher kill record when it came to missions in his short time with zero squads than even Ui did. Because of that, Hajime agreed to that unstable and new surgery to give him the powers of a ghoul while retaining his humanity.

He had died. Ui knew this because he was fighting alongside him when he fought against Take and lost track of him. At the time he only cared about fulfilling his grudge against Take, any thoughts he had to fight with children on the battlefield, of making children fight one another for the sake of his and Take’s grudges were secondary to him.

He had been repressing them. He repressed so much they were nothing more than an icky black tar in his stomach now slowly poisoning him.

“Don’t I look older now special class? I bet you’re surprised, huh?”

Hajime kept egging him on as if he was desperate to reveal some information. Ui wondered if this was his plan all along, to cause enough of a fuss that he would be discovered like this by someone in authority.

“You’re still short.”

“Hey, I’m taller than I was before. We can’t all be beanpoles like you!”

Hey may have aged since they last met, but whatever he had been through did not seem to cause Hajime to grow up at all. He was still posturing, still trying to be the best and the strongest around him in a childish competition. If he was strong then he would never be weak again. It would be funny, if the entire CCG, no sorry the TSC was not run on that same logic.

“You’re basically just a hat rack with a black wig on it! Get over yourself.”

Hajime said, laughing and pointing.

“Okay, I’m over myself. So, why are you still alive Hajime? If you were alive shouldn’t the CCG have known.”

“They did know. Hey, hey, what do you think would happen to this academy, if people knew that at one time you just used it as a selection pool for who you were going to cut up and shove ghouls organs into their back? Do you think you’d still be given free rein to run the place.”

“You seem to know a lot.”

“Of course I do because I’ve seen the dark underbelly of this world - umm, are you going to smoke in front of me?”

Hajime’s voice seemed to raise an octave when he saw Ui grabbing for the cigarette box in the front pocket of his red and black striped vest. Ui’s eyes looked up for a moment. “Do you want one?”

“Are you kidding, I’m just a kid?”

“You’re nineteen aren’t you?”

“The smoking age is twenty!”

“I thought they were changing that this year… You can give knives to kids but you can’t smoke, that’s a strange morality you have there.” Absurd even, Ui thought as he lit up another cigarette. Blowing smoke in the air and watching some of his life force escape away with the ephemeral cloud he blew, he stared passively back at Hajime. “I know kids, and kids only throw tantrums like this when they want to talk about something so-”

“It wasn’t a tantrum it’s a perfectly executed murder plan. I’m only revealing myself to you now so-”

“So let’s talk,” Ui said as he exhaled smoke again. “Do you want me to buy you some melon bread?”

“I can’t eat that any more special class.”

💀

Ui found himself in the early morning, watching his own coffee swirl while the kid in front of him loudly sipped his black coffee through a straw. He had asked if he wanted any food, but Hajime had turned them all down.

Apparently, Hajime drank the coffee through a straw because he hated the taste of bitter things. Ui did not understand that really, he liked drinking black coffee, as raw as it could be. Not that he was a bitter person. Oh wait no definitely, he was definitely a bitter person.

 

“You still haven’t explained how you’re alive.”

“Haven’t you heard of the medical miracles of Dragon?”

Ui had actually. A doctor recommended that he tried an experimental treatment for his stomach using the latest advances in ghoul medicine, but Ui turned him down. It seemed a little bit wrong, killing ghouls all of his life only to have the healing processes natural to their bodies save his.

“So, if you were brought back then why doesn’t the CCG know about you?”

“We’re called the TSC now.”

“Sorry about that.”

“That should be obvious, what kind of clothes am I wearing?” Hajime had been dressed in black. It was the same kind of uniform, that Koori had worn himself when he was working with Furuta six years ago, as well as the same one the Okahiras wore. The only real difference from the time he was an oggai was that Hajime was no longer wearing a mask.

“You should try to keep quieter, it’s early but there are still other people dining in the cafe.”

“Nishi-Nishishishishi.”

Hajime’s laugh sounded like a snake flickering his tongue from one side of its mouth to the other to taste the air. “You’re a really stupid adult you know, relying on a kid for all these obvious answers. Nobody will look at me, because I’m a lost child.”

“A lost child?”

That seemed accurate. Hajime was quite childish still, and apparently, the CCG had misplaced him if he had been alive all this time.

“The world is divided into the people who are seen, and the people who are invisible. Those who are loved are seen by others, and the children without love are invisible. I thought back then if I was strong enough I wouldn’t disappear but that was just a childish fantasy…” Hajime finally put his drink down and looked Ui straight in the eyes. Those eyes like lumps of coal, all light seemed to disappear into them. Ui wondered if it was alright for a child to have such dark eyes. “That’s why I was able to die and come back from the dead without a single person noticing.”

That did not explain much though, like what Hajime was trying to accomplish at the academy, or why he gave a knife to that kid, or even what he had been doing for the past six years. Ui wondered if he was going to get an answer behind all those dramatics. “So, what are you planning to do now that you’ve been found, Hajime-”

“Nezumi. It’s Nezumi, and I’m surprised you even recognized me.” Ui only understood what he meant when Hajime grabbed his hair and combed it backward with his fingers. The face that was hidden by that hair, was completely different from the one he remembered the original Hajime having. “Sasaki chewed my face right off…don't even remember what it looks like anymore, and I used to be so cute too.”

Ui’s face barely moved in reaction to this. The story he had been told was false then. He said the Oggai were caught up in dragon just like many of the members of Juuzou’s squad that had been brought down there by accident when Furuta forced Kaneki to turn into a dragon. Even though Ui was present, he was not at the epicenter, however, he could remember when the tentacles had suddenly appeared from the depths and attacked both him and Take, he sliced one open with Taruhi and a white-haired child spilled out of it. His eyes looked like that were scooped out, and Ui remembered staring into it and seeing a pitch black absence of light, darker than any darkness he had seen before. So that had been an oggai child. “I have a photograph of your old face if you want.”  
Hajime spat his coffee for a moment in surprise, and then seemed to truly consider before looking down at his feet. “No thanks don’t want it, because I’m Nezumi now.”

“Why didn’t your face just grow back as your old one?”

Ui did not push it. Hajime was thirteen when he died. If he had actually lived at that time, then he had spent the past six years living on his own, dealing with the fact that he had died and not a single person had cared. It was probably more than Hajime could handle, so he stopped being Hajime and became Nezumi instead.

It was probably an insensitive thing to ask.  
Which is why Hajime stood up right then and left the table muttering about going to the bathroom. He was gone a little bit, and Ui wondered if he would have to chase after the kid to get some more answers.

When he returned back, Hajime sat at the table again.  
“A friend taught me a neat trick to heal my face. Hey, hey, what's with that look that says 'I can't believe this kid has friends?' Huh?”  
He said covering his face with his hands childishly lie he was playing peekaboo.

Ui looked up from his coffee slowly, only to completely crush the cup between his fingertips. Which was unfortunate, as he had been drinking his out of a glass after ordering the most expensive item on the menu. He did not even notice the pain of his fingers contracting tighter and tighter on broken glass.

Because right then, Hairu’s face was staring back at him. Hairu’s face on Hajime’s head, with his hair hidden behind a cap he must have pulled out of his pocket.

“You’ll pay more attention to me if I wear this cute face won’t you?” Hajime blinded her eyes, those long girlish eyelashes that Ui had seen in close range several times when Hairu who had no concept of personal space got too excited, stepped into his personal area and stood centimeters away from his face when her breath tickled his cheek and he forgot how to breathe.

Ui’s hands immediately slammed on the table, but despite his urgency, he whispered in a voice strained to hold back all emotion. “How… how do you know about Hairu?”

“We were on zero squads together weren’t we, when we ran all those drills Koori-senpai.”

“What do you know about her?” Ui would not let him evade any more.

“That’s my point exactly. This entire time you haven’t been listening to me at all, but the moment I bring up somebody you care about you started to pay attention. I’m just some kid to you since you have no connection to me you won’t lift a finger. You couldn’t possibly understand me, not when you have two parents.”

He did have two parents. However, he had always been distant from them. If he had a close relationship with his wealthy family, he would not have joined murder incorporated just to avoid them and stand on his own two feet. Yet, Ui did not disagree with Hajime, because it felt out of place to complain about his cold and distant parents in front of an orphan who had none at all.

“It was the same for Taro if he was somebody’s kid I’m sure somebody would have protected him from that teacher.”

“You made him into a murderer.”

“I helped him. The CCG is the one who had a murderer teaching him.”

Ui did not even correct him on the name this time. He looked to the side and noticed his hand was bleeding, and pulled a shard of glass from his palm, and casually dabbed at it with a napkin. However, some of the blood got near Hajime, and suddenly his eyes lit up red.

“Hajime, what are you now?”

“Just a rat.”

Perhaps Hajime was right. He put a hand over his face and his eyes turned back like he was replacing a mask. Not a single person had noticed the fuss. They were all keeping their head down. Ui felt sad for a moment. If Hajime was no longer the boy he once knew, that meant he could no longer eat sweet things like melon bread anymore.

“What have you been doing these past six years, tell me what happened.”

“You know, scurrying through corridors, eating garbage, listening to things through the cracks in the walls. I know all sorts of things now. Someone even told me about Tokage, and I figured I should do something about him.”

Hajime probably saw Taro as a powerless kid just like him.  
The only way he knew how to deal with it was handing him a knife, just as he had been handed on in the past.

“Who was telling you this?”

“The king of cats, obviously.” A smirk, Hajime’s teeth were pure white still they were a perfect set of teeth, even if everything about him changed his smile would be the same. “He knows everything because back in the day he used to file all the paperwork.”

There was all that paperwork again. Ui was being haunted by it. Perhaps instead of passing on into the next life when he finally died, he’d just exercise his grudge by haunting a filing cabinet.

“Then, if the dragon can really revive people is she… have you seen her?”

Nishishishi. The snake smiled at him. For a rat, he looked and sounded much more like the kind of predator that devours rats. “You would want to know, huh? Because that’s all you cared about but… if you cared so much then why didn’t you find her body and bury it six years ago?”

 

He had tried.

“Please… Please don’t look at me with her eyes like that, with such contempt…”

Especially since he knew where Furuta was keeping it in storage. Everything had happened so fast back then, and then it stopped and stagnated, and slowly it had been rotting from the inside out. All the rot Furuta had cleared away with his grand actions, it was just going to be replaced again sooner or later.

Then suddenly, the connection hit in Ui’s brain. “Wait, someone who does paperwork…”

“I can introduce you to Nimura if you want. Maybe then you’ll find the princess that you were looking for, hero. Since that’s all you care about. Maybe she’ll even tell you her secret, finally.”

Ui tried further, but no matter what he asked Hajime would not tell him about how he had survived or what he had been doing the past six years. He kept insisting Ui did not care, over and over again, and Ui did not know what to show a child who the world had forgotten about his death and did not even give a funeral that as proof that he did care.

So he had no choice, but to follow the crumbs the rat had left him.  
Six years later, after the dragon, after Furuta supposedly destroyed Tokyo and was heroically slain by Kaneki Ken and stopped from causing further damage to the city.  
Furuta was still alive apparently, and now Koori Ui knew where that was.  
This incident Ui had thought would be over with by the day’s end was far from over now.

After he finished talking, Hajime left on a whim. He said he had to go to the bathroom again and escaped through the window. Ui even checked. It was likely he was wearing a different face by the time Ui could catch up with him.

Walking home Ui noticed the reconstruction of Tokyo City was making the arrangement of the streets more complicated than ever. A murder case had somehow turned into a conspiracy where those who were supposed to be dead were walking around still. He had lifted his head up just once and noticed he was in the middle of a maze. Did anybody else notice? Was there something waiting for him at the end?

Anxiety, fear, anticipation, all of those emotions could be running through him but at the moment all he could continue to think was what a pain.

He wondered what he was going to say to Furuta. Well, conversations with your boss were always awkward.


	2. This Side of Paradise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusa reminisces over his childhood friends.  
> Art by Koyuki-tan as a part of a collaboration for The Tokyo GHoul Reverse Bang!

Whack-a-mole missions, that was what they were called.  
Fun names, it almost resembled children’s games. The games they played in the garden were just like this, they were just as violent at least.  
  
Yusa still remembered them. The twenty-fourth ward smelled nothing like the garden, the air was thick with the smell of trash, rot, and decay. However, there was just about the same amount of light. As the garden was underground, they needed to use artificial light all the way down there. The excavated and mapped areas of the twenty-fourth ward that the garden led to had the same amount of light, artificial, hanging from the ceiling though occasionally the lights would flicker in the hallways.  
  
The first time he was allowed outside of the garden and into the twenty-fourth ward for one of these missions, Yusa finally realized why they planted so many flowers in the garden. It was so the pleasant colors of flowers, and the pleasant scent of the flowers could distract from the darkness and rot.  
  
There were no such pleasantries in the twenty-fourth ward. He still remembered the first time he was sent out on a mission. It was claimed to be a test. They could never survive in the CCG if they did not learn to survive surprise missions like this.  
  
To Yusa it felt more like pest control, except most exterminators leave poison and traps to kill rats. They do not risk their lives crawling in the sewers themselves to kill rats. Yusa had been wrong in assuming that he was the exterminator though. He was just a tool of the exterminator. It was logical for him to risk his life then because he was not a predator to the rats, he was not even a cat.  
  
He was just another rat committing cannibalism. The memories of that first whack-a-mole missions were particularly disastrous, and Yusa felt chills every time he entered a dark place that smelled of death from then onwards. They were all clutching their quinques, the ones they had been training with since they were young, instead of toys or stuffed bears they were given swords to hold.  
  
They whispered amongst each other, Shio was there but Rikai wasn’t she was in a different group and Yusa was scared he might never see her again after being separated from her. They all quietly whispered amongst themselves fearing they had gotten lost, as they were told not to return home empty-handed. They prayed combat would start. Then suddenly two red eyes appeared in the shadows. Shio ran first ahead of them and jumped in the air plowing two of his knives, one in each eye. When the ghoul they had found had a partnered that ambushed Shio though, Yusa was the one who jumped in the way and cut through through it. He had not managed to cut his quinque blade all the way through the torso, so while the ghoul’s wounds started to heal and it made an incomprehensible noise with its mouth, Yusa tried to tear it out, but the only thing he could do was push it further and further into the wound causing more blood to gush out.

 _Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch._ The flesh twisted until Yusa realized he had been stabbing something that was long dead. He had no idea how much time passed. Shio clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Somebody’s eager! Did you not want to lose to me?”  
  
Shio seemed unaffected by the environment they were in. That was so like him. Yusa did not look into the dying ghoul’s eyes, so somebody else with their small assembled squad of children had to check the ghoul’s organs right beneath its spine in order to guess at whether it would be a viable enough quinque to be worth dragging back.  
  
While they did that Yusa stared into the distance. The tunnel seemed to extend into everlasting darkness, eventually, the places the Washuu had mapped off would end and the 24th ward would continue on into untamed ghoul territory. There were rumors that if you wandered the tunnels far enough you would eventually intersect with human construction of sewers, train systems, and maintenance tunnels. When Yusa had been given this mission to the 24th ward he was told it was training to go out into the outside world. That he was being allowed outside for the first time, only to look up and still be unable to see the sky.  
  
Perhaps they were trying to make him give up. The outside world would be just like this, just as filled with death, only covered up by artificial light and nice smelling flowers as the garden was. The world was just an ever-expanding series of cages and finding the door out to one only inevitably led to another.  
  
Even if that was true though, Yusa wanted to just once taste the fresh air of the outside. Not the artificial air that was pumped down all the way to the 24th ward. He considered for a moment just breaking away from the group and running. Even if Shio liked the life of fighting ghouls much more than Yusa did perhaps he would understand and stop the others from chasing after him.  
  
Ultimately he decided not to because Shio was still there. There were seven members of their squad. The next few missions they kept up that number but then a while later one by one member started to disappear. Nobody knew for sure, you took your eyes off of them one moment, if you left group formation they would be gone, picked off. Some people thought they made a break for it, the others thought that a ghoul had snuck up and dragged them away. The darkness of the tunnels was so vast it seemed like it would muffle anything, including the screams.  
  
Eventually, their squads got shifted around again and Yusa, Rikai, and Shio ended up on the same squad again with two others. Their supervisor told them that this was a good result, they had gotten a large crop qualified to be investigators. So many children were born into the garden from so many different branch families and only the five of them? Yusa wondered why that was. If the Washuu had been tending to this garden for over a hundred years, they were incredibly poor gardeners.

Except it was not five anymore, it was only one. Yusa wondered why he had been thinking of such things. Perhaps because he was walking into the 24th ward again. He looked up at the tunnel extending before him, and the same lights hanging from the ceiling blinking. Suddenly in front of them, there were two dragon orphans, human-like body silhouettes large eyes on either side with their white teeth showing. That’s right, thinking of such things, it would only make doing this heavier, slow his movements down.  
  
In an instant, he cut off one of the arms from the red bodies and dragged his quinque through half of his face as well. Next, to him, Urie mimicked the exact same motion. Yusa saw a scene play out in front of his eyes that he had seen so many times, to the point it was starting to bore him. His sword ripped through flesh in the most economical way possible, and he saw body parts flying away from body parts. What once resembled a human shape was now lying on the ground in pieces in front of him. Yusa ignored the sound of a sword cleaning ripping through flesh, and the sound of droplets of blood falling from the tip of his blade. He instead pretended both of those sounds were the rushing of water running through the sewer pipes in the distance.  
  
He wondered why he always ended up thinking of those early days in the 24th ward, where he clutched his quinque like a scared child whenever he came back here. Perhaps because when he was first sent to the 24th ward, they told him if he survived, if he killed enough he would be able to graduate and make it to the CCG, live a life on the surface. He just wanted to see the outside world.  
  
He wondered… he truly did, if surviving to this time meant he had ever made it to the outside world.  
  
“Squad Captain!”  
  
“Yusa!”

Two squadmates yelled from behind him. Yusa stood, holding his blade just above his shoulder. “It seems they’re becoming quite active again.”  
  
It was true he lived with people outside of the garden now. People who had once been a part of that outside world, who had once led normal lives and around each other they played like they were still living that normal life. Yet, even living in a household like a chateau, far above the surface, able to walk out in the real sun he still had to come down to the 24th ward like this just like when he was a kid.  
  
Even when he had been following the one-eyed king who Arima had left all of their hopes to make a better world, they had somehow wound up in the 24th ward again.

No matter how far away Yusa always came back to this place. It was like his heart dwelled here. He casually grabbed one hair from his head, a mix of greyed hair from his once black hair and white streaks. He stared at the forelock of his bangs, noticing how the white streak glowed slightly in the low light as he ignored the conversation that was going around him.

“Dragon orphans are heterogamous. They evolve at an incredibly fast pace and possess the intelligence of a five-year-old. Recently, leader-like individuals have been seen.”  
  
Five years old.  
That was about the first time he had been given a quinque. He remembered it quite well, he was locked in a room with a ghoul who had all of his limbs cut off, most likely a prisoner from Cochlea and told if he did not kill him he would not be allowed to go back to see his mother again.  
A person with the intelligence of a five-year-old could definitely become a killer, Yusa did not doubt that at all.  
  
“A long time ago, it is believed that something like the dragon war happened which gave rise to the ghoul species itself.”  
  
As Urie spoke their two companions complained behind him.  
  
“So both of you get all the credit again?”  
  
“Y’all are too fast.”  
  
“You guys go on ahead. I’m going to see Shirazu.” Urie said as he left Yusa in charge of the squad.  
  
Yusa’s eyes wandered forward, they wanted to keep wandering forward even if it meant leaving his skull. He saw the tunnel extending in front of him again, if he kept running down it though he might find a ladder out, or a hole that led to a deeper part. There were sewers and maintenance tunnels running alongside it. He could hear the water rushing alongside the walls like the river Styx. If he threw himself inside, and then let the running water take him if he drank all the water perhaps he could forget about his previous life and finally make it to that outside world.  
  
What was stopping him now? It was probably because he remembered, all of those things from the past. Shio, Rikai, and now Hsiao and the other members of his squad. He could not justify achieving freedom for himself when they had never tasted it. If only he could be born into the next life with no memories like that chaining down on his heart.  
  
Did you know, some people are born with happy memories of the past? They can think back and smile? Then what is somebody with no happy memories at all supposed to do? He considered just running away and trying to escape just like he did when he was a child, but Urie had left him in charge.  
  
“Okay…”  
  
Yusa muttered, not really hearing anything else, the silence of the 24th ward was too loud for him it had swallowed up all other sounds, just like it would swallow him up one day.

 

💀

After he finished the mission, Yusa took an extra long shower and even washed his hands afterward. No matter how hard he tried though the stains would not come out. He stared at the red coagulating at the bottom of the bathroom drain.

  
He changed his clothes from his work clothes to his button up collared shirt, suit jacket and tie and on the way to the hospital bought a bouquet of flowers. On the street, as he held the flowers, somebody asked him if he was going to visit his girlfriend with that many flowers in a teasing way. Yusa flashed them an awkward smile because he had no idea what to say.  
  
He did not know how to explain that he had bought flowers so he did not show up in his friend’s hospital room smelling of blood. No matter what he did the scent never seemed to go away, he could only mask it.  
  
Yusa Arima was not human, but he was allowed to walk on the streets the same as other humans, and ghouls that were given clearance by the TSC. Exclusively the streets of Tokyo. He was neither a ghoul nor human, nor was he a hybrid. If asked he would say he was somebody who failed both at being a ghoul, and a human.  
  
As a living failure, his lifespan was limited. His distant family member apparently, had all of his hair turn white by the time he was in his mid-twenties. Yusa was only twenty-one, and his accelerated aging had hit to the point that there was not a single black hair left on his head. In both of his hands, he was starting to develop arthritis, which made wielding a sword the only thing that kept him alive at this point far more painful than it needed to be. Apparently, at this age Hairu’s ears started to go, as well as Arima’s eyes. If Yusa was given control over what part of his body deteriorated he would like to be unable to smell anymore. He was tired of, both the smell of blood and flowers, all pleasant and unpleasant smiles.

  
  
Due to their limited lifespans, Ching-Li Hsiao had worked every day until she was 25 years old, and then suddenly collapsed. He did not know which part of her was deteriorating specifically as she refused to tell him, but he figured it was her legs. If it was any other part of her she would have kept working because that was how Hsiao was, but now she was bedridden.  
  
She was kept in a reserved wing of the CCG hospital away from the normal patients. The lights were bright, the air smelled like disinfectant, and the walls were an unfamiliar gray so Yusa could see why. Ever since she collapsed, he was the only one from the chateau to visit her regularly.  
  
Yusa considered it his obligation. They were something like family, well, considering their knotted, overlapping, and twisted branches of their family tree they were probably related too.  
  
He could understand the others not coming to visit. Their family was within the chateau, they wanted it to be a happy place if they visited Hsiao they might notice her absence. Yusa had no idea what a family even was, so he really did not feel the pain of losing it.  
  
When he went to the room he saw Hsiao resting on the bed with her eyes closed. He smiled at her even if she could not see it, and then put his bouquet down and bean to pull flowers out of it. There were several vases arranged around her bed. Hsiao looked like a very popular hospital patient even though Yusa was the only one who visited. He often told her everybody else was busy with work, and Hsiao the workaholic herself understood. With so many flowers present, it was like this room was a miniature garden of its own.  
  
Hsiao was confined in it at least. There were many wires attached to her, and many iv strips some of them Yusa who considered himself moderately intelligent in ghoul biology and medical science because of his upgrading had no idea what they did. So he looked away from them, and worked on finding the dead flowers amongst Hsiao’s vases, and replacing them with a gentle hand.  
  
When Yusa finished that he noticed Hsiao was only pretending to sleep. Yusa walked over and lifted up her blanket, seeing there was paperwork she was hiding from him. “You should stop trying to get work done, and rest.”  
  
“It doesn’t matter whether I rest or not, the end result will be the same. So I should make the best of the time I have.”  
  
Hsiao sounded optimistic at least.  
If that was optimism though, Yusa wanted none of it. For the longest time, she had been like a big sister and he faithfully listened to whatever she said. He was quieter and less forceful than her. If he had questions he always kept them to himself.  
  
Once, when she had held him and put her hands around his ears and said. “We have to live Yusa, we have to win this fight for the sake of the garden children.”  
  
Yusa looked at Kaiko in front of them. His half rotting face. The blood dripping from the corners of his lips. He was probably starting to vomit blood because his insides were hurting too much from the action. Kaiko had sparred against him once and stopped the match in the middle of it to cough blood and shove some obscure pills in his mouth.

Kaiko was a garden child too. They were killing garden children so the garden children could live. Yusa had no idea what kind of logic that was, but at the moment he had clung to her because he wanted her to be alright. Not to die as Rikai and Shio had. That was all he thought about.  
  
Now their bodies were rotting away just like Kaiko’s were. Siding against Kaiko meant they slowly worked themselves to death, siding with Kaiko would have meant they were chopped into pieces on that day. Yusa wondered what the difference was. Was a slow death, or a quicker death crueler?  
  
He should stop thinking about death though. He did not want Hsiao to die. That was why even the quiet and distant Yusa was finally starting to speak up. He grabbed the paperwork and tore it away from her holding it close to himself. “You should just rest. Don’t you have a book you want to read? Do you want some food, if it’s anywhere in Tokyo I can get you some.”  
  
Because they were half human, they could taste food at least. Shio liked sweet and sour food, but to Yusa all food had tasted like mush. He had never experienced the feeling of being hungry or craving a certain kind of food. Apparently, it depended on the half-human whether human food tasted like anything or not. Yusa was told many times though he was lucky that he could at least swallow the food.  
  
Hairu liked melon bread, and so did Shio. He did not know what Hsiao liked. All Hsiao seemed to do was work, until she made herself sick.  
  
“I don’t want any food, the hospital provides me with enough already.”

  
She held her hand out expecting him to give the papers back.  
  
“Hsiao, please.”  
  
“They say I’m doing fine. I’ll be able to return to work in a month if the experimental treatment pans out.”  
  
“Experiments…?” A small amount of emotion entered his voice as he repeated the words. He walked forward and touched one of the wires that were running out of Hsiao. They were just strings, strings for marionetting a puppet around. “Hsiao, you shouldn’t let them run experiments on you.”  
  
“They’re doing it for our well being, Yusa. If these tests can help solve the aging condition of half-humans then isn’t that a good thing?”  
  
“If they wanted to slow your aging down why did they wait until now? Until you stopped being useful for them?”  
  
The only time Hsiao ever smiled in the past was when she was with Hairu.  
She smiled a little bit when she was with Saiko.  
Yusa asked her if she was sad that Hairu died. If that was the reason she did not smile anymore.  
  
_“Hairu is gone.”_ _  
_ _  
_ _She said simply._ _  
_ _  
_ _“I don’t want you to die as Hairu did. We shouldn’t go on missions anymore, don’t you think we’ve fought enough?”_

 _In their childhood years, they had fought more than anybody else had in an entire lifetime._ _  
_ _  
_ _“Why are you saying all of this now, Yusa?”_ _  
_ _  
_ _“Hsiao, I want to protect you.”_ _  
_ _  
_ _“Hairu is gone, I’m still here. If you want to protect me then fight what’s in front of you, wimp.”_

He wanted to protect her even now. However, he had no idea who he was supposed to fight. The Washuu Family was gone and yet they were still here, still with the TSC. If he killed every single last dragon child, would they let Hsiao retire in peace?  
  
“Hsiao. Don’t go back on duty next month. Just retire.”  
  
Yusa pleaded again.  
  
Hsiao spoke in a direct and harsh way, and she was as stubborn and immovable as the earth and that was why she had been strong in the past. With her legs not working though Yusa wondered if she was still strong. In spite of that Yusa had never admired her strength, what he admired was the way she was so straight forward, she was equally straight forward with her kind words.  
  
Even though it looked like a pain to move her arm, she lifted it up and touched his cheek. “I want to go back to that house, that’s why I can’t retire.”  
  
“...Hsiao.”  
  
“Yusa, take care of that house for me, will you? I like that house just the way it is.”  
  
“Come back please.”

“Mm, We’re so lucky, those of us who don’t have families of our own, who weren’t born to any family, we finally found a home in that chateau. Isn’t that a wonderful thing? That’s why, even if you miss me don’t cause trouble for them, I’ll return to that chateau soon enough. Do all the chores, and complete your missions so you can stay there. Protect it for me.”  
  
Hsiao was being kind to him.  
Those words were sweet words. Especially since home and family were what everybody else had. Yusa wondered though like he was always wondering, why they had to work so hard, why if they spoke up, they would be disturbing such things. Because of the way they were born they had to earn what everybody else already had, they had to work themselves to death for it.  
That was why her words of kind encouragement, every single word was a dagger to him.

💀

“Ohhhhh! Haru-shia! Come eat! Come, come!”

After he went home, Yusa took off his tie and jacket and hung it up, and started to do housework as he pulled an apron over his collared shirt. The chateau was like a home, like a family, he was told that. Of course, several office workers pretending to be family, meant there were going to be a few manchildren and woman-children among them.  
  
The house was a mess usually when Yusa left it alone for a while. Responsibility tended to slide on whoever would pick it up. Saiko was very encouraging but she never did any of the work herself. Urie considered himself the father figure of the house and apparently that meant sitting down to read the newspaper instead of helping with the cooking and cleaning.  
  
Yusa himself had never been a child, so he really did not feel like being a man child now that he was over the legal age. The moment he got home, he began with the cooking, and to wind down after that he did the cleaning afterward. The only other person in the household who cleaned as much as he was Touma.  
  
“Put your backs into the cooking kids!”

Saiko called from behind him.  
  
“Yusa, you mean.” Ryuusen Tatsumatchi, one of the third generations Quinces called out as well. Susu Sanzu was sitting on the couch next to him. The newest residents of this household.  
  
Yusa only quietly responded, without his lips so much as twitching or his facial expression changes. “Okay, I’ll put my back into it.”

  
“Well done my padawan,” Touma said next to him.  
  
“Touma, could you go get some Mirin?”

Yusa tried to drown out the noise of the conversation behind him, focusing on his slicing and dicing. He saw the vegetables in front of them and quickly chopped them into smaller pieces.  
  
“Hsiao’ll be able to return to duty next month, I hear. Looks like we’ll be having more chefs around.”

_She’s sickly don’t make her cook._

“The homely feeling of the chateau is coming back… nfu…”  
  
_If you want to feel like home you should go visit her._ _  
_ _Hsiao wants a home too._  
  
“You should drop by more often too, Mucchanko.”  
  
“Well I got promoted, I’m a special class now.”  
  
“That’s my chanko.”  
  
“I guess… (special class, I’m still just associate).”

 _Even if Mutsuki were here, you two would avoid talking to him like usual._  
  
“By the way, Maman’s kid is so big, and…”  
  
“So you went again, eh Yonebayashi?”  
  
“You should come too, Uri!”

 _If this house is your family why are you constantly visiting that other one?_ _  
_ _Are you having an affair?_  
  
Yusa was grateful for once, for his own quiet and reserved nature. Usually, he felt like the things he wanted to say the most he was never able to bring himself to say, and when he said them he spoke too softly and was easily trampled over.  
  
This time though, if he had spoken any of those thoughts it would have only brought him trouble. He was better off not saying them. He did not want to break his promise to Hsiao to protect this house. It needed to stay intact, so she would have a place to come back to, a reason to return, to keep living.

Flowers needed sunshine, nutrients, water, all kinds of things to grow, and they had been deprived of it their entire life. That was why they wilted so easily and nobody cared when they did.  
  
After they all ate dinner together, Yusa was assigned to do chores with Saiko. Which meant he would do the laundry while Saiko watched, and encouraged him. Well, she shouted encouragement at him like a cheerleader, Yusa did not know if it was actually that encouraging.  
  
What would really be encouraging is if there were two people folding this laundry. Saiko considered herself cute, she had many cute qualities, she was always nice to everyone around her. She was very cute for a woman bordering thirty, but Yusa was not allowed to bring up her age.  
  
Yusa learned a long while ago though that being nice and being kind were two separate things. Niceties were like saying do your best, you look good, you’re strong, those kinds of words were cheap anybody could say them. It was truly a lot of people did not say them, a lot of people did not smile at you and welcome you home every day. Yusa could not say that Saiko was doing nothing at all, she was always quite nice, pleasant even. She was like those flowers that he used to stare at in the garden, the fields of flowers that were kept around them. A pleasant, sweet smelling, a distraction that you could watch and smile.  
  
Being kind, however, was a risk. Kindness would say sparing a ghoul, knowing that later that ghoul might come back to kill you, or you yourself might be beaten when you came back home to the garden empty-handed.  
  
Yusa did not complain to Saiko though, because he never considered himself a kind person either. He knew though that Kishou had once told him that if the world allowed him to, he had wanted to be a kind person. He had wished for a kinder world. That was why Yusa knew how hard kindness was. To be kind you had to fight back against the world and even someone as strong as Kishou had not been able to do it.  
  
“Hey, Saiko… If you have time to visit Kaneki, do you think you can visit Hsiao?”  
  
Yusa asked while holding a laundry basket in his hands. Saiko was cute, and because she was cute she did not like non-cute things. She disliked looking at ugly things. Hsiao had become much less cute since she was sick.  
  
Not that Yusa thought she was shallow. It was just unpleasant, she had already nursed her mother who slowly died anyway, and now he was asking her to go visit another dying person.  
  
“Hmm? Hsiao is going to come back in a month, Saiko will see her then!”

  
“She might be happy if you came to visit her now.”  
  
“True, true, Saiko loves Hsiao very much, just like she loves you, and Uribo.”  
  
Saiko loved everybody.  
But didn’t loving everybody also mean, that you did not like anybody in particular.

  
“You should visit her, and tell her not to come back to work. You don’t like work anyway, do you Saiko? She doesn’t listen to me but if it’s you…”  
  
“Saiko can’t tell Hsiao not to come to work, otherwise she won’t be able to come back to this chateau. Hsiao loves working very much because she can be with us.”

“...Okay.”  
  
I see.  
Ah.  
Okay.  
Yusa’s three favorite words. Every time he tried to bring something up, he was not listened to anyway. It was good he was such a quiet person, if he spoke more he would be ignored more.  
  
“Are you in a bad mood, Yusa? You should come to visit Maman’s child with me next time then! That house is so happy, and that kid is getting so big she always runs around and plays with everybody.”  
  
Saiko was right, it was probably a much happier household. He would be happier too, instead of going to a hospital and surrounding himself with death. Arguing with Hsiao who would not listen to him and take care of herself. Yusa could tell Saiko was trying to change the subject.  
  
“Maybe we can bring Hsiao there in a month too when she gets better. Is she used to being around little kids?”  
  
Everyone in the garden was. They all played together as children, and the older had to watch the younger ones in between their lessons. However, Saiko did not know that either Hsiao had never told her or she simply had not asked. He wondered if Saiko and Urie knew the real reason she was hospitalized was accelerated aging.  
  
Nobody ever told a single person about the garden afterward. The story was still that it was an elite academy for orphans that were tapped to be potential investigators. Yusa had been keeping it a secret all this time, perhaps that was the reason he was so quiet.  
  
“No thank you.”  
  
“Do you want to see pictures of her, she’s super cute!”  
  
“It’s okay, I have to worry about this house.”  
  
“Too bad, Maman’s house is super fun. You know when I went there last time Maman’s wife made me the most delicious coffee-”  
  
And she kept talking like that for a while now. Perhaps she was trying to cheer him up. Yusa still could not shake the feeling, that Saiko wished she was living in that house, perhaps as one of Kaneki’s children. When Sasaki Haise betrayed the CCG (Yusa was there too at the time) apparently, Saiko never stopped holding out hope that he would return to the Chateau. Perhaps that was what she was doing even now, waiting for him to return. She had never stopped.  
  
Yusa couldn't blame her for clinging to happy memories either. He was sure if he had happy memories that he would cling to them. He could not even blame her for not noticing his melancholy, melancholy by definition was a quiet sadness, after all, he probably did not want to be noticed.  
  
He drifted to the couch away from Saiko and saw Susu Sanzu lounging on the couch. “Jeez, you’re moody as ever Yusa, even in the garden you were moody.”  
  
“Moody…” He repeated in a soft voice.  
  
“You know distant, brooding, head in the clouds!”  
  
“You’re making me sound a lot cooler than I really am, I’m just quiet.”

Children should be seen and not heard, and garden children were special because they were neither seen nor heard.  
  
“Don’t go half-assing things like you normally do. You should be more like Hairu or Hsiao, fight more.”  
  
“Fight…?”

_I am fighting._

Apparently, his vocabulary was limited to repeating the last thing back of what others had said to him. That was called an echo, fitting for an empty person.

“Seriously, why are you so half-assed.”  
  
“I was born that way I guess.”  
  
“That’s not what I mean. You’re the only one here who didn’t get the qs surgery.”  
  
“The surgery doesn’t extend our lives, there’s no point in getting it.”

“No point, it makes you stronger!” Suzu was a fighter, just like Hairu was, just like Hsiao was. Suzu admired how much Hsiao was able to live, how strong she was, she attacked everything in front of her like she was determined to live. “We only got a little bit of time you know, we have to make the most of it, more than anybody else. Hairu did that, Hsiao did that, but you, all you do is spend your time staring into the clouds.”  
  
“I suppose so.”

“This place is better than the garden and you know it. Be more grateful and stop sulking Yusa.”  
  
“You’re right.”  
  
He was alive at least, Shio and Rikai had never even made it to this house.  
  
He did not even bother to disagree with her. It was true he looked at the sky often, he wanted to see the blue sky next to the tragedy that everybody else saw. Apparently, even though they were all different some ghouls, some humans, and some in between they all shared the same sky.

Yusa simply turned his back away from her. Hairu had lived, Hsiao had lived, they did not waste their time. If that was the case if Suzu admired Hairu and Hsiao so much if that was the proper way to live, then why did they both die? _Hairu is dead. Hisao is dying. They told her the q’s surgery might expand her life but it didn’t make a difference in the end. You’ll be next, so please don’t die._  
  
No matter how much she mocked him though, he could only wish that for her sincerely in his heart. They had been born in the same place after all. Flowers had no choice but to grow towards the sun, no matter how or where they were planted how badly they were taken care of they would still try to seek the light. They would try to grow however deformed or stunted they were.  
  
That was why he wished at least one of the garden children would live. Even if it was not him, one day they might make it to the outside world. Yusa wandered away and to the balcony, wanting to look at the night sky again.

On the edge of the balcony, he saw a single flower lying there. Perhaps it had blown from somewhere else and landed there by coincidence, he thought, until he picked up and saw the kind of flower it was.  
  
That day in the 24th ward six years ago, Touka and Kaneki had thrown a wedding. On that day Shio, RIkai and himself had gotten covered in flowers. Rikai picked up a blue flower with white borders around the inside of its petals and tucked it into his hair, telling him to never forget this flower.  
  
Shio got into the festivities much more than Yusa did. Whether it was killing, or dancing, somehow Shio always was much livelier than him. Rikai was frowning behind him until she was grabbed by him suddenly and pulled into the dance.  
  
Yusa wanted to dance too. He had never even danced before, but at the time he was happy enough just to watch. If they made it to the world that Arima wanted, perhaps they would be able to dance carefree like this another time. At the time, he remembered wanting that.

It was the exact same flower, the one Rikai had told him not to forget. He saw some moving in the bushes, and immediately put a hand on the banner of the balcony and jumped over it. The chateau had an entire grounds, with trees and shrubbery, Yusa knew because that was also one of his chores. There were plenty of spots to hide so he did not hesitate at all before he gave chase, jumping from the second floor and landing on the ground.  
  
Ow. That hurt his joints slightly. He should stop acting all young and spritely just to look cool when he had the body of an old man.  
  
He did not know logically what he was thinking. Seeing a flower he remembered seeing six years ago, somehow meant he might see friends who were dead for six years again? There was no logic to it at all, he simply ran forward following a feeling. Yusa had many feelings all throughout the day but he almost never listened to them.  
  
That was why when he finally cornered the fleeing shadow he felt his heart drop into his stomach. There was a child there who he recognized, someone from six years ago, someone who was supposed to be dead but it was the person who had killed Shio and Rikai.  
  
Hajime Hazuki smiled at him. Even if his face changed slightly, hidden behind long, knotted, and tangled hair, Yusa would never forget that smile. That pure white smile somehow remained white when he had cut Shio fatally with one of his kagune, and gotten Shio’s blood splashed all over his face. In one slice, like popping the head off of a flower, Shio was suddenly gone. Then, he saw Rikai charge showing more emotion than he had ever seen out of the girl. In the next second, Rikai was gone too.

Flowers were so fragile. If you stepped on them, they would break easily.

He had replayed the scenario so many times in his head like he was running the same tactical drills he used to when they were all together in Zero Squad. Arima would instruct him in a cold and strict voice that he had to make the right decisions in fractions of a second otherwise everything would go wrong. It always sounded so simple when Arima explained it, if you fought smarter and faster than the enemy then they would always die. For Arima it was like running a math formula,  as long as you plugged the right numbers in you should always get the perfect end result.  
  
Then that must mean there was something Yusa had done wrong, something had gone wrong in the formula. He should have been able to act perfectly and decisively at the moment like Arima always did, protect his friends and kill the enemy in front of him. That was why he replayed the scene like he was analyzing it in training because no matter how much he thought about it he did not know what had gone wrong. He just knew that he was the one who had done something wrong, failed to bring out the perfect result. If he was still alive Arima certainly would have scolded him.

“You lot will die here. Because Ken Kaneki is not with you.” Hajime sprung back on his hand in order to dodge the twin short swords of Shio. Suddenly a kagune grew from his back to catch him, digging into the concrete underneath him and twisting his body around in the air. He spun the momentum into a kick at Shio’s shoulders.  
  
“Shio!” Rikai called out as Shio recoiled from the blow.  
  
Hajime did not let up two more kagune arms grew from his back and rushed at Shio from both sides. Shio was unfettered by this as usual. That was just how Shio was. Life or death, he always faced it with a smile. It was not that he felt the weight of these things and decided to smile anyway. It just seemed like he did not even realize that his life or death had any meaning, to begin with. He was too stupid to know. He smiled in battle like an innocent. When blood was on his face his smile was there like a cruel innocent. “Probably think I can’t dodge this, right? But..”   He slammed his hands directly onto the kagune rushing at him and sprung off of it flipping into the air. He probably only let himself get in danger in the first place so he could pull off a cool move like that. It never occurred to Shio that fighting was something that hurt others, he never considered the consequences of his actions that far he just fought to show off how strong he was. “Tada!” He landed like a gymnast with his hands spread wide.  
  
“Kinda forced that one… Owie…” A moment later Shio was forcibly dragged back into reality as he looked at his bleeding knuckles, he had cut them on his own sword and done blunt force trauma from the stunt he just pulled.

“Shio, he’s not human, stop fighting like he is. If it can use a kagune, think it a ghoul.” Take said, turning his attention away from the fight with Ui for a moment.

Yusa spotted it, yeah that was probably it. The moment that it all went wrong. The moment he heard those words leave Take he knew, that he was just doing the same thing as he was before. He was still fighting ghouls for the sake of the garden. Even after leaving the CCG, even after watching Arima die, even after retreating into the bowels of hell he was still standing in that same flower field. No matter how far he ran he would never escape it. That must have been when Yusa gave up, and merely watched as those were plucked like flowers right in front of him. No wonder he watched their plucking with no reaction at all.  
  
Take’s words were all he needed as a reminder. The fate of all those from the garden was senseless death while hunting ghouls.  
  
“Cracking me up over here.” Hajime laughed at the idea he was a ghoul, with two kagune behind his back whipping through the air wildly, growing teeth that gnashed together and two pitch black eyes that glowed red.  
  
His two kagune moved like scaled snakes slinking across the ground as they rushed forward, lashing out once again and driving into the earth hard enough to kick up the concrete hallway of the tunnel. Rikai and Shio wee just barely able to jump back this time. Hajime’s kagune retreated and returned to him wrapping itself around him like a snake coiling itself before the strike.  
  
Hajime cocked his head as his kagune squirmed back and forth. He must have been bothered being called a ghoul by Hirako like that because he had given up all pretense of fighting like a human. “He’s right, I don’t need to fight you like a human. It’s too bad those human bodies of yours get exhausted quick.” He taunted them, as he smiled the veins underneath his eyes and running through his cheeks became even more pronounced under his skin.  
  
Now that Hajime had given up on close range combat, or fighting with his hands all Shio and RIkai could do was hold up their weapons in defense, Rikai’s halberd, and Shio’s two short swords.  
  
“We need to make it back to Yusa and Hirako-san’s side,” Shio said Yusa could hear him calling out, at the moment though he was too busy acting like a robot merely defending against Ui’s blows and not even trying to attack as he and Hirako took on Ui at the same time. He did not even think of going to their side. They always fought like a four-man unit in the past Yusa wondered what was different now.  
  
It was like Take had already accepted this would be their last stand and decided it all for them. Yusa saw it in the way he was fighting against Ui, not to win, not to protect anything, he was fighting like he had nothing at all.  
  
“Listen, Shio if one of us gets knocked down this fight is over. We’re not Arima, we can’t take a ghoul down alone.” Rikai was as cold and methodical as usual. The Zero squad had always been encouraged to fight together like this because they were just backups for Arima, they were all just half-beings on their own and could only be a small part of a whole.  
  
“I’m going to protect you then, Rikai.” Shio just heard whatever he wanted from Rikai’s calm analysis of the situation.  
  
“What, do you want to run away from me? It won’t work though.”  
  
He contorted his back as if forcing it. His kagune twisted outwards towards them like they were both about to be devoured by a snake. Rikai and Shio both jumped back and dodged in opposite directions, separating. Hajime did not let up, he was relentless. His other tendril had tunneled into the earth and after boring a long tunnel emerged from the ground under Rikai’s feet and wrapped around her leg. Carelessly, the kagune arm grabbed her and threw her straight into a wall like he was just throwing away some unwanted toy.  
  
Shio’s earlier declaration was meaningless. He saw Rikai’s broken form against the wall and rushed after her.  
  
Rikai cried out, probably calling him an idiot or something but the moment passed too quickly that Shio did not hear here, and Yusa did not remember what she said. All he remembered was the pure white smile being revealed as Hajime’s lips parted knowing his plan had worked.  
  
What if Yusa had left Take alone and went to fight with Shio and Rikai.  
What if Take had told Shio, Rikai, and Yusa to flee with Touka and fought Hajime and Ui himself.  
What if they didn’t care for each other that much.  
Then maybe things would not have been over so quickly.  
  
That was how it was for the garden children though, they fought their whole lives to stay alive, only for it all to be over in one slip. It did not matter how strong they became. Just like Hairu, one single moment and it was over, all that fighting became meaningless, one slip on blood and then.  
  
He knew what they were fighting for, not to protect the ghouls of Goat, not to change the world, in the end, all Shio could think about was Rikai. They just wanted to protect each other. When Shio rushed Hajime was there before him. His kagune grew out and like a knife sliced through Shio’s body tearing a chunk out of it.  
  
That was not enough though, even if it was a fatal blow the boy in front of him was not broken enough.  
  
“He’s fighting to protect his dearest companion, how sweet! Come on, you have to suffer more, prove how strong your love is.”  
  
Hajime cooed.  
  
"I guess you love wasn't strong enough."   
  
He did not even let Shio’s body fall to the ground, his kagune tunneled up once more piercing through it. There was no meaning in it. He juggled it up in the air for a moment and then got bored and tossed it to the side.  
  
A moment ago Rikai was only thinking about recovering on her own, and rejoining the fight but now due to one careless mistake on Shio’s part made in the name of protecting her she saw her entire future devoured in front of her.  
  
Rikai forgot about everything else and crawled over to Shio on the ground.  
  
“Welp. I’m sure if you just gave up and left you might have made a narrow escape. Is there any point in dying like this when Ken Kaneki isn’t around? Do you really think he’d fight the same way for you?”

Hajime said as he approached Rikai who had dropped to her knees. Shio’s broken body was in her arms. Her halberd was still in her off hand. Hajime slouched as he approached still making casual conversation.  
  
“Why don’t you just throw it away? What’s the point of ‘protecting’ a dead body? Do you have a crush on that thing, yikes! Is it because you want to take revenge for him? You won’t be able to do that if you hold onto him like that.”  
  
Rikai said nothing. There was a broken piece of kagune lodged into Shio’s neck.  
  
“Was it worth it, betraying everything? Do you guys even want to help ghouls? Didn’t you kill them en masse, just like Kaneki Ken did in the past? I don’t get it what the hell are you fighting for, you’re all fakes… You-” He casually took Rikai’s own weapon from her hand, she did not even fight him on it and leveled the halberd at her throat. “Will never be accepted by them. Just one more slash your head will have to say goodbye to the body.”  
  
“It’s impossible for me to walk alone. Sorry.” Rikai replied, but she was not talking to Hajime n the end, she curled her arms around the discarded body, and brought he head on top of Shio’s resting it there like she was trying to protect it.  
  
“Why don’t you just let it go? Stop acting like that, you boring trash.”  
  
“I’m on my way too-” Rikai coughed blood, unable to finish her words.  
  
‘You won’t become one no matter how much you wish it. There’s no place for you, so what were you protecting? You never had anything, to begin with. So, you’ll never realize the pain that losing things you treasure gives you. You’re all alone, no adults care about you.”  
  
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.  
  
That was the sound Hajime made as he tore through Rikai’s throat. Yusa remembered hearing it even all the way down the hallway, the sound still echoed in his ears to this day.  
  
“You should have just fought for yourself,” Hajime said, despite the fact that he was smiling and laughing on the high of victory a moment ago his voice now sounded empty.  
  
Yusa’s heart twisted and he tried to run after her thinking if he killed Hajime in time she might be able to recover. Take had grabbed him by the back and dragged him back into his fight with Ui, because if he left his guard down Ui would take him down.  
  
That was the only time in his life Yusa had ever wanted to scream. At the time though he could not, because he was still fighting. He was always fighting, he would never get a chance to scream.  
  
Even now completely silently, Yusa rushed forward and grabbed Hajime by the neck pinning him against a tree with his hands. He forgot all logic, he forgot to call for reinforcements or use a quinque. His body was supposed to be stronger than a normal human’s, right? That was why he had been born this half-formed thing.  
  
“What do you think this is going to do?”  
  
“You killed… you killed…”  
  
The words were lost in his mouth. He thought he lived with the wound of what was missing for six years straight, he thought he lived with the pain of that wound every day but this fresh reminder made it even more unbearable.  
  
“So what? If you kill me, all that’s going to make is more dead kids.” Yusa raised his hand and slammed it against Hajime’s mouth to shut him up, but Hajime just licked the inside of his hand. Like he was five or something. It worked though. “You taste good! Yusaaaaa, I’m surprised you even feel enough to be bad at me. Did they let you mourn your dead friends? Did you even get time to cry, or did you just get dragged back into fighting again.”  
  
They were… yes, they had been his friends. Something like that he was sure if a garden child was allowed to have friends. He wanted to cry for them. He was sure he was sad enough to cry, but he had fought for six years straight. He was always fighting. He needed to be strong to protect Hsiao.  
  
“...”  
  
“Hey, hey, does anybody in the chateau know about your secret?”  
  
“Hsiao told me I couldn’t tell.”  
  
“That’s too bad. Your precious family, your home, lets you suffer all on your own, but here I am your enemy sympathizing with you.”  
  
“Sympathizing with me…?”

“Well, isn’t the same? The garden, the academy, weren’t they just trying to plant children there to grow up into good investigators. We grew up in the same place we’re practically childhood friends.”

“...”  
  
Childhood friends, that was what he, Shio, and Rikai should have been.  
They would grow up together.  
They would experience adolescence.  
Fall in love  
Yusa thought of Rikai for a moment, what would she look like if she had been allowed to grow up.  
  
“You’re not one for conversation are you.”

“How…” Yusa pushed him harder against the tree. He was as much of a murderer as Hajime was. Hajime should know better than to taunt him and expect him to be the good guy that holds back to his villain. “How did you know about the garden? You weren’t told about it when you practiced with Zero Squad.”  
  
“How else, Shio and Rikai told me.”

“...”  
  
“They’ve become best friends with their murderer, but they don’t want to talk to their old buddy anymore, stingy, am I right?”

Yusa let go, letting Hajime fall to the ground in front of him. The boy desperately gasped for air, but even his gasps quickly turned into that laughter.

_Nishishisshishisshi._

The sound of a rat’s footsteps scurrying in the sewers. Yusa could not kill him, he could not kill the person that had killed both Shio and Rikai. Even if he was lying right now, it would mean killing the only chance he had of seeing either of them again.

 _My home.My family._ _  
_ _It’s not here, it’s with those two._  
Yusa wondered if he ran away with Hajime right now if he left all of this behind in an instant would he finally be able to see them? Were they waiting for him in the outside world he had dreamed of all his life?


	3. Banal Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ui has a chat with some old friends.

  
Ui Koori wondered how Furuta Nimura’s survival could have gone unreported all this time. Perhaps some paperwork had been misfiled. Cochlea was still intact, even though the TSC did not officially hunt ghouls anymore. In the surrounding cities of Japan, the countryside, the CCG was intact and still operating under the same procedure and before and the best weapons against dragon orphans were quinques apparently, which needed to come from somewhere.

Cochlea looked as far removed from life as always. The walls were bleached white and soundproofed to prevent the prisoners cries from escaping. He wondered what these ghouls, in particular, had done to get them to sentence to eventual harvesting. At least they might have finally decommissioned the meat grinder in the basement, Ui was not entirely sure as he had not been a regular investigator in years.  
  
He wanted to smoke as soon as he entered the building but one of the employees gestured towards a no-smoking sign, frowning underneath the white surgical mask they were wearing on their face. Of all the inhumane things that were allowed in this place apparently smoking was not.

He had no idea if Furuta was really waiting for him here, or even how to reach him. He wondered how most detectives in noir films looked so confident, he was following a half baked lead at best and vaguely aware of the fact that he was winging it. When he finally met up with a staff member that could show him around, Ui did the thing he knew how to do best. He caused a fuss, lectured the person, and told them he was Ui Koori, vice chair of the academy and one-time advisor to the chairman, so obviously, he had authority to be here. He wanted to see the secret prisoner, he might have new information on the dragon, Marude sent him here to get the information out of him because of their connection in the past.  
  
The name drop seemed to do it. Humans were banal creatures after all. They bowed down to authority and chain of commands easily, even if the employee knew in his gut that Ui did not belong in this place the moment he dropped the name of a person of authority in a higher position that employee lower down on the food chain could not bring himself to disagree.

Ui followed the employee in the hospital mask and scrubs down. The stairs spiraled downward, and with each step, Ui could not help but wonder if he was descending into the world of the dead. If that was the case, was the Orpheus, the moment he turned his head around to look for Hairu she would disappear once again.  
  
Then what should he do? If she was alive right now, and she had not looked for him did that mean she was living just fine on her own? With every step of his descent, Ui’s uneased worsened.

Then just before the doorway another employee tried to stop him, and tell him to wait. Ui had already done enough waiting. He pushed him out of the way and forced himself into the door. The moment the door cracked open a scream escaped from the inside of the room.  
  
A ghoul was being harvested on the inside. His hands were locked in two mechanical looking cufflinks, and his back arched to the limit as two longs rods drove right into the area at the base of his spine. Over and over again they stabbed into him and turned his flesh. Ui saw flesh twist, flesh rends, flesh stretch to the point of breaking.  
  
Every time it did stretch past its limit, the entire area turned red and reformed. They said a snake would continue to live even if you cut it into pieces as long as those pieces were sewn together again. Before Ui’s eyes, he saw it, a snake was cut apart and sewn together, but maddeningly it happened in short intervals lasting only a few seconds.

  
The aim seemed to be to first activate the organ and then when it was the most primed, rip it out whole. The man’s skin was so tight on his body, that the veins were apparent underneath and they grew thicker and thicker. His entire body convulsed as the metal rods dug into the area at his spine and just below it. His eyes were pitch black, so black that even the pupils or irises could not be made out anymore, and the veins in his forehead were such a thick black his face looked like a thin paper mask that had been pulled over it, to the point of breaking and tearing. RC pathways were rebuilding in his body, by the forced need for regeneration so that when the organ was extracted it would be primed with the most RC cells possible.  
  
The goal was to keep the organ alive and filled with RC cells even outside of the body. There were some officers that joked that their quinques had a taste for blood because of this. Then suddenly all at once after the great build up, a thick black kagune from his spine grew, like black spikes underneath his flesh, emerged all over his body running up his spine then blooming from his shoulders and soon these mess of kagune coagulated into the shape of armor. The two ends from each side of his head came together like two misfit sides of an upper and lower mandible, and it looked like the armor that was forming around him was devouring him.  
  
Everything else before that seemed like a pleasant warm up, as suddenly from both sides several metal rods drove into him and then slowly began to pull the armor apart off of his body. His flesh was fused with the armor in some areas and because of that Ui had to hear the slow tearing of flesh once more. No matter how painful it looked through the machine did not stop, and kept going at the same methodical pace until the skin was peeled away. Then finally the machine stopped its harvest, and the two metal cuffs holding his hands back mechanically unlocked at the same time.

His face had been half torn out by the Kakuja armor that had been harvested, but even so the moment, he lowered his head his black hair flopped over covering one of his eyes. Furuta Nimura stood in front of him, his torn apart face slowly growing back due to his regenerative powers.

The last time they saw each other it had been like this too, Ui watched the chairman of the CCG pick himself up from the ground, and slowly grow back his face which had been bitten off and pick up and reattach an arm that was grabbed onto by a tendril and then sewn itself back on the missing joint.  
  
“What are you doing barging in on my private time, special class pervert?”  
  
Even at a time like this, he had a joke and a smile. That was Furuta Nimura, who never took anything least of all himself and his own pain seriously.  
  
Nimura had been naked the entire time, not just metaphorically. He had a wide scar across his chest that never seemed to reform no matter how many times his body healed. His spine was not straight, rather his entire body curled forward as if standing was too much pain for him. From above suddenly sprinklers activated dousing the both of them. Ui’s hair grew damp and heavy falling in front of his face, and he heard Furuta’s chuckles rise above the sound of the water.  
  
“Awe bath time and they never give me a ducky. This place is so cruel.”  
  
That was probably not his first harvesting. Ui’s might have thought Furuta had gone completely insane by now from repeated harvests if this was not exactly how he sounded most of the time. He stumbled forward a few more steps. It looked like his entire body wanted to collapse, pride at seeing an old coworker, or co-conspirator and wanting to look them in the eye was probably the only thing that kept his head up.  
  
He only made it a few steps before collapsing forward. Ui moved without thinking. He had no positive feelings towards Nimura left. If he remembered one of the last things he said to him was _fuck off_ and that summarized his feelings even now. Yet here he was, holding his arms out to catch the naked Nimura and he let the other cling to him sopping wet and cold just so he would not fall.

“Is that a gun in your pocket or are you excited to see me?”  
  
“You’re the one with his dick hanging out, idiot.’  
  
This completely inappropriate exchange was somehow appropriate for Furuta. Somehow standing there completely naked, he did not look naked to Ui. He was still wearing something to conceal himself. It was not a matter of covering his body, but rather being able to see someone completely exposed.   
  
After all in the Garden of Eden before humans ate the fruit of knowledge, they were naked, but they had no idea about it. They were not exposed. They felt no embarrassment over it at all. That was how Ui felt looking at Furuta right now.   
  
Furuta did not seem to mind that Ui had seen him with his organs being ripped out, or even with his floppy organ between his legs just hanging there. In fact he seemed to be enjoying watching Ui's reaction to seeing his former boss in such a vulnerable state. His coal black eyes were scanning Ui's features for any kind of details.   
  
Then, that only begged the question what was it that would make Furuta feel exposed? Ui had no idea. Just that enduring this much pain, and this much indignity had not brought it out just yet. That's always what talking to Furuta had been like, like playing a poker game where the opponent cockily puts his entire hand out on the table and plays with his cards face up and then declares that he is going to win anyway. Even with all his cards showing he could still hide something, that was the kind of liar Ui saw him as.   
  
So, then an interrogation scene, Ui thought to himself. However, no matter how many images of black and white crime dramas from the past that he conjured into his mind none of them seemed appropriate. Furuta was just too postmodern for that kind of interpretation, or perhaps he was too dada. Furuta might have laughed at that joke, but Ui making that joke in his own internal monologue made him cringe and shudder.   
  
There was a crook, there was a detective there was an interrogation room but even though all the pieces were aligned on the stage properly they did not seem to fit together. It was like an image that the more you stared at it the more of an unsettling feeling that something was not right. Ui could not put a name to the sensation just yet.   
  
Furuta was crooked of course, as petty of a crook as they came, everything around him seemed to twist and Ui had just been one of those who he twisted up. To this day, Ui did not know why Furuta had picked him of all people. The worst part about it was in the end after leading him on with false promises to the edge of the cliff, Furuta seemed happy when Ui did not throw himself was. He seemed relieved even. That was impossible though because Ui was sure, Furuta did not even know what happiness was except for something to recklessly destroy. There was no malice at all in Furuta's voice when they parted.   
  
He even said sorry.  
Ridiculous.  
What kind of villain apologizes?   
  
Uncanny, that was the feeling he got looking at Furuta right now. It had taken him this long to place it. Furuta was supposed to be playing a certain role, but he just did not quite fit the part at the moment and the more Ui tried to align the pieces in his mind the less they fit together.   
  
There was no more classic villain, then someone who released a Dragon to devour countless lives.   
One who taunts the hero and is slain by him at the end of the story to protect the world.   
There was no more classic a hero than the lone detective against the world.   
  
But, neither of those roles seemed to fit them as they sat opposite of each other across the desk.   
There was nothing classic about this scene, it was definitely postmodern.   
Uncanny.  
Uncanny valley.  
Now he finally could put into words what Furuta reminded him of. 

In the movie, Bladerunner replicants are machines born for labor with a limited lifespan. They were pre-packaged with a sell-by date, and yet they were sentient, alive, and aware of how quickly they would die. A few of them escaped to earth and tried to hide amongst the population. They were like a human in every way and the only way to tell them apart was a long interrogation.   
  
One of the questions was, "You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?"  
  
If Ui asked that question to Furuta though, he was sure Furuta would just smile and say "Because it was funny watching it's little legs struggle in the air."   
  
To him, Furuta was like a Replicant putting on the world's best act of being human. It did not matter what was behind the mask at all to Ui, he was sure if he peeled his face off he would see wires sparking and hear the whirring of gears behind his eyeballs as they spun around.   
  
It did not matter what was underneath the mask because a machine could be anything it wanted to be. Perhaps he was flattering his old boss like this, he hoped Furuta would not think he was trying to suck up by calling him the perfect actor. The man who had hoodwinked the CCG.   
  
That was how Ui had seen him... but that was not the case anymore.   
The uncanny valley, a term in robotics for the phenomenon where the closer a robot comes to seeming human, whatever is there that is not human becomes all the more noticeable.   
  
Furuta was dressed in the Cochlea's Prisoner uniform, a set of white robes that hung loosely off his body. He was so skinny that his skin seemed to be clinging to his bones. Whatever his internal components and circuitry were, some of it must have been removed.   
  
The water had ruined his jacket, so Ui had taken it off and draped it on the chair behind him and he only wore a white button-up shirt now.   
  
“You don’t need to worry, Special Class." Furuta paused. He had the look of someone who had thought up a really good line, but then just forgotten it. His eyes looked around searching for it for a second, before he continued as if nothing happened, as if he had never fallen silent. He must have been experiencing a bit of lag in his programming. "E-even though they forced me to put on these robes I’m entirely naked under here. If you get stage fright just think of that.”  
  
Furuta was a perfect actor. He had never stuttered on a delivery of a line in his life.   
Ui recalled the term for when actors broke character on stage, it was called Corpsing. It happened all the time on old live television like the Carol Burnett show. The most common form of Corpsing was when the actor broke out laughing because they could not remember their lines.   
  
It was called corpsing because the most inappropriate time to laugh was when playing a corpse. What an appropriate name though, for Furuta whose skin was so tight on his body he looked like a few days old preserved corpse being puppeteered around.   
  
Ui thought all of this, but he did not want to notice the crack that appeared in Furuta's first line, so he just fired back a response. “Why the hell would I think of that?”  
  
“Have you ever seen a kagune harvesting in person? If not, then I’m glad your first time was with me.”  
  
“Don’t phrase it like that.”  
  
Furuta's head rolled back. Normally it was impossible to keep Furuta on topic, even when they had been in the CCG together Furuta had a habit of doing six different kinds of paperwork at once for six different topics. Being with him felt like when a child refused to sit still, he drifted from emotion to emotion topic to topic, but this was different.   
  
It looked like Furuta had spaced out and forgotten what he was talking about. He stared up at the ceiling for awhile not even making eye contact. “You know what the worst part of this is? They’re phasing out the Arata armor because apparently, the guy they were harvesting for that died of stress a couple of months ago, so they turned to me because I have a full-bodied Kakuja armor and do you know what? They already named the Arata - Joker! That should have been the name of my quinque don’t you think? I’m way more suited or Joker than Juuzou.”  
  
As he said that Furuta tried to gesticulate as he normally did. It was as if he could envision moving that way in his head, but when he tried to raise his arms over his head he just could not. He could barely get them above his shoulders. Then, he tried to throw them out at his sides, but he winced. He messed up his delivery, the veteran actor on stage was floundering. “I-it’s no fun if they’re going to turn me into a quinque and not even give it a cool name then what’s the point?”  
  
After he said that Furuta's face fell forward on the table. Perhaps it was on purpose because he did look like a pouting child. On the other hand, Furuta seemed to lack the strength to lift his head again. Ui could not tell. 

 What was the point?  
Ui wanted to ask it about an entirely different subject. Why was he trying so hard to seem like the mastermind sitting in the CCG's office even when he was in the middle of his jail cell?   
He should just cry and go for pity points, that was what any normal person would do.   
If he was a replica, if he was an actor, then he should have been able to grasp that at least.   
_Manipulate me again, Furuta. Show me you're still a fake._  
Ui just did not want to think that it was Bureau Director Kichimura that might have been the fake.  
  
Fake... huh.  
Now that Ui thought about it there was one point in his life he was convinced all the emotions showed by a ghoul were a fake just a convincing act.    
No, don't think about it.   
If Furuta wants to just keep playing a comedy routine than Ui would keep playing half-assed Tsukkomi to their two-bit comedy routine.   
  
“How did this happen… how did you survive?”  
  
Furuta lifted his hands up again slowly and then covered his face as he slowly rose his head. He performed, the most dramatic, slow motion, eyeroll ever of all time. His eyeballs rolling around in his skull was slightly ruined by the fact that he needed to use his hands to move his head around because pivoting his head on his neck looked too painful for him. “Gosh, you came all the way here just to bore me with the most obvious questions possible Special Class. I thought you were a little bit different than everybody else.”  
  
“Different… how so?”  
  
Furuta deflated. Once again he dropped himself. Ui could not tell if it was because he was overreacting for comedy's sake, or because keeping his head lifted was too much effort for him.“Well, most people are selfish, but in boring and petty ways. I think if you’re going to be horrible, you should put on a show about it you know, have a tragic flaw that tears your chest nearly in two. Everybody else is so terrible in such predictable ways, if they’re going to be bad they should be entertaining at least, where’s the pizzazz.”  
  
He raised his hand slightly and gestured with all five fingers at the word 'pizzazz'. However, his hand was shaking and it was not an acute case of jazz hands that caused that shaking. If Furuta was a machine, then some of the wires were probably crossed and others were ripped out and gutted. Then whatever was left to reassemble him was not enough, his circuitry became patchwork, and he was still trying to be functional out of that mess of circuitry. In that case, when there was poor wiring work, the simplest of motions would draw too much energy. Furuta was just trying to wave his hand but instead, he caused his hand to shake.   
  
Then suddenly, he slammed his other hand down on his shaking hand as if that would hide it. He pushed down forcefully for a moment as if his hand did not belong to him and was not moving of his own accord and he had to fight against it.   
  
Ui ignored this too and kept talking. “People are selfish and petty then what does that make you?”  
  
Furuta's eyes sparkled. He looked like he had been waiting for Ui to ask that question. He let both of his hands fall on the table, with a loud thud. “Well obviously, I’m the most selfish, and I’m the prettiest! I have aspirations you see unlike the vast majority of people, I was ambitious and set out to be the best of the worst.”

Whenever he moved suddenly like that though, Furuta winced afterward. The pain was clear on his face. It was odd because you think you would have gotten used to the pain after being harvested like that and the painful display Ui was shown from the harvesting process earlier.   
  
It was possible though that you never got used to the pain. A constant throbbing, a chronic injury that only got worse and worse, despite always being in pain somehow pain keeps surprising you. Then, living becomes synonymous with prolonging the pain. 

No- Ui was not going to empathize with him. He could care less the pain Furuta was suffering. He needed to stop trying to imagine it. He needed to stop noticing all the little details that were wrong. They were breaking his immersion with the performance. “You should stop getting so worked up, you’re going to hurt yourself.” And yet he said something stupid like that.   
  
Sometimes Ui talked without realizing it, he had no idea why words just escaped his lips. Perhaps he had spent so much of his life trying to be someone else, trying to be the emotionless, efficient, investigator Arima was that Ui had once seen as heroic, that sometimes the him from before the CCG that he thought he had buried rose up again.   
  
“There it is. That’s that wound that’s going to tear your chest apart.”  
  
Furuta lowered his head. Even that motion was too sudden, too jerky. As if one of his strings had been cut, causing his head to bob. He probably wanted to punctuate that sentence with a dramatic lowering of his head as if to look down on Ui, but he was sabotaged by his motor controls.   
  
“What? Common sense?”  
  
“No, no, no, no, no, nonononnonono...." Furuta trailed off again, repeating like his internal cd was skipping until suddenly he rebooted again. "What good is common sense if it stands in the way of looking cool?"

  
Furuta forced his head back. As he did so his hair fell back away from his face. His skin was cold and clammy. His eyes had that faded cloudy quality that only corpses had, or rather his eye. When his hair (which was greasy, drenched in sweat and stuck to his skull looking nothing like the flowing black hair Ui remembered seeing, guess there was no haircare products in prison. His skin too looked like pure white drywall that had completely dried out and cracked. There was no Soseido lotion either.) But again to his eye, it was missing. His eye and what looked to be the entire side of his face which his floppy hairdo usually covered was missing. All that was left was scarred skin. It looked like it had been torn away, or rather bitten away.   
  
There was pieces, no whole chunks of him missing and yet he continued speaking. If Furuta was a robot, he was one of those that would keep talking even as its brain was blown out, its head kept sparking, and it's motor and speech functions glitched even as it began shutting down, he would just keepr unning his mouth. "What good is common sense if it stands in the way of looking cool. I mean those eyes of yours, you act all bitter and cold but those eyes of yours have so much emotion they’re about to melt. Quit looking at me like I’m a person, that’s disgusting.”

  
“If I could look away I would.”  
Ui said, but that was a lie.   
There was an ugly and flawed performance being put on in front of him but Ui did not look away once. The more he noticed the cracks the closer he looked.   
  
“No, you wouldn’t… if you could look away you wouldn’t be down here. You could have forgotten about me but the moment you saw the truth you began to chase it.” Furuta Nimura leaned forward. He tried to cross his hands in front of his face but it took a moment. It looked like Furuta lacked the depth perception to allign his fingers up together so he needed a few slow clumsy tries. When he finally had it, Ui finally noticed. The hands that Ui had seen were always covered in a pair of red gloves, no matter how many times he was called into the office it was like that. It was the first time he had seen those hands naked as Furuta rested his chin on top of interlacing fingers. The hands were covered with all kinds of burn scars, to the point where the flesh had turned almost completely red. They did not look recent either, it looked like a wound that had stayed with him since childhood. Furuta tried to hold up his chin with those hands, but even that seemed to be too much weight for him and his hands shook again.   
  
Furuta's hands could not hold anything, anymore.   
  
“You learned about me, how did you learn about me again? Hmm.” Furuta stopped to think for a moment. Ui let him because all he could do was watch Furuta's body shake on his frame. As he watched he pleaded inside of his head for Furuta to stop shaking like that. As he stopped to think Furuta seemed to lose track of time, as once again he slipped and ended up thinking longer than he even realized. Finally when he spoke up, “Oh, could it be the little rat sent you?”

“His name is Hajime. Did you tell him to do start calling himself that? You're a terrible influence."  
  
“Well of course I am, I was the one who led him to his death.”  
  
Ui had nothing to say to that.  
If Furuta had done that, then Ui had helped.  
Still, he admitted to being a terrible person far too easily.   
When Ui came in here, he expected to hear Furuta list off all kinds of excuses, that was what villains were supposed to do when their backs were against the wall. They wanted to claim it was never their fault, that they had no choice and therefore no responsibility.   
  
But it was odd, even when Furuta's body was jolting back and forth, and moving in ways he did not mean it too like a broken puppet with half of the strings crisscrossed, missing, or broken, he still did not act like a puppet.   
  
“Jeez, come on talk to me already. You don’t know how boring it gets down here. No wonder Donatocchi gave out so much information to investigators, he must have just wanted the company.”  
  
“Fine then, let’s start from the beginning. How did you establish contact with Hajime? What are you using him for?”

“Oh, we’re serious now. A serious interrogation. You’ll never catch me, alive copper! Haha!”  
  
Furuta clapped his hands together slowly. He would probably clap much more enthusiastically if he was able to. When he did it though, he seemed like one of those broken wind-up toys. Like the monkey that was supposed to crash the cymbals together, but he could not quite bring the cymbals together because the wind up key was lost.   
  
Ui asked another question without realizing.   
  
“Furuta… you’re barely holding on by a thread, how have you not gone insane already?”

  
At that Furuta ’s body went limp. His erratic movements ceased and he looked at Ui in the eyes for the first time. Swirling pools of black from which no light could escape, coal that had been buried in the bottom of the earth for countless years. He spoke in a voice that had no inflection at all. “If I could escape all of this by going insane and simply forgetting what I’m experiencing, I would have done it a long time ago.”  
  
That was it, that was what was bothering Ui.  
For a person who should have been by all rights insane, a laughing madman that tried seriously to destroy all of Tokyo.  
He was acting far too sane. Too aware. It bothered him.   
It bothered him because he did not know the truth. He did not know not before he was captured and imprisoned. Not even when he was in the CCG. Some very long predetermined amount of time before that. Furuta had the look of a feral child who had been born in a cage and spent his whole life in a cage, why would he care now about being confined in another one?

Ui still had no idea about Furuta, he had never seen his true face once despite being beside him all this time gazing at his side profile and yet at that moment, he felt like he understood what he was saying.  
  
“Even if I did go insane it wouldn’t last, I think I probably would have gotten bored of it.”  
  
“I’m not sure that’s how insanity works.”  
  
“Well if it isn’t then it’s no fun!”   
Furuta tapped his fingers on the table, impatiently, drumming them. should have been losing his patience. Every time he tapped, an expression flickered across his face like that tiny action was giving him joint pain. Ui was the one who should be losing his patience. Furuta kept wildly changing the subject and making little sense, and worst of all Ui could no longer tell if he was doing this on purpose or he had lost control of himself.  
  
When Furuta was backed into a corner, when forced to show his real self, he seemed to come up empty and throw every personality trait against the wall to see what stuck. He was quiet yet belligerent, polite yet offensive, he was smart but he played the fool, in other words, he was everything but nothing.  
  
He was the quiet meek assistant who went "Alright, alright, okay, okay, yep, yep" and only chatted away other generic responses, and then in the next moment he stood in front of the entire CCG giving speeches to sway their hearts, bold, and commanding like he could control all of them at once. Somehow, those two completely opposite personalities were the same person, somehow he made them fit together, that was what Ui had seen of him. 

Even then as Ui mentally described him like that, he felt like he was buying into Furuta’s image and simply being fooled by him to make him out to be more than he was.  
  
“Well, I’m not controlling Hajime or anything like that. In fact, I didn’t even find him, he found me.” Furuta on a whim changed the subject back. “He trades information with me on the outside world, and in exchange, I tell him about the CCG’s little secrets. I assume it’s been six whole years so they’ve done nothing to fix any of them.”

“You’re quite the optimist I see.”  
  
Furuta's head tilted crooked and he cracked a smile. Everything about him seemed cracked, even his lips were entirely dried up and faded out. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe me if I said this but I’m being honest, in my group of friends I was the optimist of the group.”  
  
“Of course I don’t believe you, you liar. You never had friends.” At this, Furuta pouted slightly. He tried to hang his head but that gesture was too painful so he stuck his lips out instead. “How did you learn all these things?”

“Easy enough. I did the paperwork.”  
  
That damn paperwork.  
Ui was going to declare it his enemy. He had the flames of justice on his side. No, that was stupid. 

“Furuta, tell me again how did this happen to you? How are you alive?”  
  
“You don’t care…”  Furuta insisted the same way Hajime had. “In fact what are you doing down here I still haven’t figured that out. You must want something that I know... “  
  
“Did dragon enhance your regenerative ability?”  
  
“Yes, yes it did! Now I can be harvested an extra special amount of times, and since I’m the villain who took down the CCG they don’t really care about what it does to me, but that’s not the issue." Furuta tiled his head back like he had heard something, even though Ui did not even say anything. He suddenly sat up from his chain and leaned over the table. As he stood, his knees shook and knocked against each other once as he tried to get his footing. He leaned far over the table and put a finger on Ui's lips. "Sssh you, I’m trying to show you how brilliant I am…”  
  
Ui had not even said anything or tried to interrupt him.   
  
Then after a few moments of silence, Furuta continued talking all on his own. “Let’s see if I’m alive, then reasonably somebody else might have been revived by Dragon and you want to know about them… Arima, or maybe Hairu?”

Furuta smiled looking at the change in Ui’s face. No matter how hard Ui tried to repress it, he could not hide it from his eyes. His expression went beyond a smile, it was like a crescent moon was rising on his shadow of a face.

Ui wondered why he thought of the moon right now.  
The moon was, something you could look at and never touch.   
If you held your hand in front of your face for a moment you had the illusion of holding the moon between your fingers.   
Nobody would take that illusion seriously.  
The only people who actually dreamed of holding the moon in their hands had desire that exceeded the earth's gravity.   
Desire that could devour a whole city.  
The desire for everything. 

Furuta spoke up interrupting his thoughts. 

“It’s just like I said, you don’t care about me. You’ve come here to ask about Hairu, haven’t you? Are you going to beg me to tell you she’s still alive just like Hajime was, you haven’t learned anything in six years have you-”  
  
“Why the hell am I supposed to care about you?” Ui slammed both hands onto the table as he stood up. His voice was so loud, he heard scratching at the back of his throat. He could not remember the last time he had gotten this worked up. He had been dulling himself, his feelings, his thoughts, his pain with nicotine all this time simply trying to live until he died. “You taunted me with a decapitated head and tricked me into committing mass murder! That doesn’t really make us friends!”  
  
Furuta cooed. “That’s just because I didn’t understand the true meaning of friendship all this time, I never realized the power of human bonds and connection, I was just misunderstood teach it to me, Special Class Ui.”  
  
“Go to hell.”  
  
“I’m already there thank you.”  Furuta removed his chin from his hand and leaned back on his chair. As he did so, Ui heard several of his spine vertebrae popping. His joints must have completely rusted over by now. Ui wondered why he kept pushing them like that. “Oh, you mean just like Arima tricked you into committing mass murder by telling you ghouls weren’t people and you were a hero for exterminating them when he knew the opposite was true all along?”  
  
“He couldn’t tell me that. He had a reason.”  
  
“Yeah, that reason being he didn’t like you as much as first-class Hirako so he only told him.” Furuta clapped his hands on both sides of his face. He stopped for a moment looking like he seriously regretted doing that, it looked like it hurt. Lag time. And then he finished his joke. “Oh nooo, senpai doesn’t notice you what are you going to do?”  
  
Ui said nothing in return, but that silence was enough of a response. Furuta filled the silence in the air between them with laughter. Ui wished he would stop laughing. Not only was it tacky to laugh at your own jokes, but also Ui remembered his previous thoughts about how it was inappropriate for a corpse to laugh.   
  
He suddenly realized why corpses should not laugh. They could not hold himself together. Laughter looked physically painful for Furuta, his rib cage rattled and his when he moved his arms Ui could hear the bones grinding against each other like all cartilage was worn away at the joints. Yet still, he laughed, laughed until he was broken, and then laughed some more.   
  
He was a laughing skeleton, he looked like he wanted to start dancing around, and playing the xylophone on his ribs. If he did that though, if he laughed too much as a corpse he would probaby just fall apart into dust.   
  
Suddenly, Furuta's laughter cut off as if he forgot what he was laughing about and then he started to badger Ui again. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey...." He repeated too many times, skipping agian. "Hw come you love him and not me? We’re the same aren’t we?”  
  
“You’re not the same.”  
  
“Oh, that’s right in the end I was honest at least and apologized to you. Arima couldn’t even bring himself to do that. So now-”  
  
“Furuta, when we were in the lab together you always left me to go stare at a girl in a tank. Sometimes I even heard you whisper things to her. If you’re alive, does that mean she’s alive too?”

Ui felt so bitter, he should be enjoying Furuta's pain but his every sign of pain just made Ui hurt more. He had no idea why. He did not want to see these cracks in the mask appear. Most of all he did not want the mask to fall off.   
  
The idea that there was a human underneath all of Furuta's actions somehow made him more scary to Ui. As he had no idea how a human would bring himself to do all the things that Furuta had done. He expected a puppet master but all he saw was a broken, sparking, and twitching machine. Yet, all of those errors in his programming did not secretly reveal there was someone hiding behind the curtain all along.   
  
It just made it all seem more senseless. The small signs of humanity just made him seem more inhuman, made him make less sense to Ui. There was something off about the whole thing but he could not put it to words. He did not know why the once star actor was getting his lines wrong. He did not know why the top of the model machine's programming had all been all scrambled.   
  
Even when his act started to break, he did not show his real self under that mask. It was like all that lied under the mask was another mask, all that lied under the act was another act. Act spiraling upon act, mask spiraling upon mask, all of them were in a senseless maze impossible to navigate. At least impossible for Ui to understand...  
  
Why would someone just keep putting on acts?  
Like that was all they knew how to do.   
  
Furuta seemed to forget the exact emotion he was supposed to display. He did not even seem to realize what face he was making until he touched the contours and grooves of his face with his burned up hands. The sight of it was just too much for Ui, he finally just asked as plainly as he could the question that had been burning inside of him and churning his stomach worse than his cancer did this entire time. 

“How did you even end up like this, Furuta?”  
  
“It should be obvious, with what Take told you about the garden. I thought most normal people would realize the horror of that place but I’ve severely overestimated-”  
  
“The garden…?”  
  
At that, Furuta smiled.  
The moon rose on his face, the shadows in the room seemed to lengthen as his whim. “He didn’t tell you that’s... Pffffttt hahaha, perfect! That’s so perfect! That’s so like him, even in death Arima and Take are such a wonderful comedy duo, bravo for them bravo!”  
  
He clapped his hands in a maddening way, and then Furuta continued. “You never noticed…? How inhuman your precious Hairu and Arima seemed? Like they were raised outside of society?”

 And so Furuta told him, point blank.   
Furuta had never been more straight forward in his life then he was at that moment.   
  
It turned out Furuta was a replica after all.   
Now Ui felt like it was a cruel metaphor to make, it took him far too long to remember that the replicas were never supposed to be the villains in that movie. 

“You two were friends, after all, Take didn’t tell you about that? I’m surprised.” Furuta dragged his hand through his own oily black hair. “Oh, there’s one more thing I have to apologize for. The day Hairu died, I could have saved her if I was fighting at all seriously. I just stood there and watched her die, and then killed the ghoul that finished her in five seconds afterward and everybody else in the room. However, I don’t really think it was me who killed her. That day she was stabbed but she was still alive and instead of running away she said she had to kill the person in front of her, and so her little head rolled off her shoulders. What a clumsy girl.”  
  
“Hairu…”  
  
“Why did she have to kill so badly? Oh, that was right because she wanted Arima to praise her. It’s such an easy thing you know, to pat somebody on the head. It takes no effort at all. Do you think if Arima had just noticed her even once, she would have been so desperate to kill that day? Whose fault do you think her death really is?”

It did not matter how much Furuta tried to twist the knife at the moment though because none of his words reached Ui’s ears. The moment he heard the truth about the garden, about bred children, Ui had detached from the outside world entirely. Everything, the CCG, the TSC, Furuta, they were all just words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words. An incomprehensible labyrinth of words extending in front of him.  
  
Hibiya. Kasumigaseki. Kamiyacho. A voice… is Furuta’s voice talking to me? Yurakocho.  Roppongi. Hiroo. Nakegoro. Shit, we’ll arrive too quickly at this rate, let’s take a long way around...Ebisu. Shibuya. Harajuku. Yoyogi. Shinjuku. Shin-Okubo. Tadano-baba, Mejiro, Ikebukuro, Otsuka, Sugamo. Komagome Tabata, Nishi-Nippori, Nippori, Uguisudani, Ueno, Okachimachi, Kabhiahara. _The melon bread I had with Hairu at Kanda was delicious. Hey. hey. Wrong! Start Over!  
_  
He saw Hairu’s face looking at him smiling, her lips as pink as her hair she somehow smiled with her whole face, he thought it was beautiful she was able to show so much emotion. Then suddenly a line was drawn through her neck, and her face was scratched out replaced by scribbles.  
  
He thought he was mourning the death of a colleague he had grown close to. He thought it was sad that Hairu did not seem to have much of a life outside the CCG. That no one attended her funeral besides him. That all that was left of her was a single crate of her belongings packed from her barren apartment.  
  
He was so stupid. He claimed he cared about Hairu, but never once had he realized what she was going through. How painful her life must have been. Being born into the CCG, trying to make the best of what little time she had, thinking she had to kill brutally to be recognized, dying completely invisible soon to be forgotten.  
  
All she wanted out of life was for one person to smile at her, and tell her she was worth it, but she could not even get that. Hairu lived for the sake of what small love she could find, she was okay with a little bit, she had made peace with all of that and her reward was to die brutally having her head ripped from her body and her corpse violated. She died all alone, and unloved.  
  
He never once thought of her pain what it must have like to be her. If only he paid more attention to her, if only he thought of anything besides his own pain. Tears leaked from the side of his face. So much and so suddenly that even Furuta was interrupted from his monologue.

“See that’s what I’m talking about. Those eyes of yours. They care so much at what they look at, it’s disgusting. Quit looking at me it’s making my skin crawl.”  
  
If somebody ever wept like that for Furuta, with genuine empathy from the heart it probably would kill him. Koori Ui considered it just to kill Furuta, but realized he did not want to think about Furuta any further as he wiped his eyes and then collected his jacket to leave.  
  
As he was escorted out, he wondered if he should destroy every piece of evidence that he had ever been here. No, now that he thought about it, he wanted to get caught, he wanted to be brought up before the higher-ups and questioned.  
  
But first, before that, he had one more thing he needed to take care of.

 

💀

 

Take lived in the countryside. It was an old Japanese style home, with sliding appear doors and tatami mats. Ui was glad for that, it made barging in all the easier after he had made the train trip.  
  
Take seemed to be in the middle of doing some kind of paperwork when Ui arrived. He had not slept at all that night and had little patience for anything else. The moment he saw him, Ui grabbed him and slammed both of his shoulders against the wall.  
  
Ui heard in the distance, two dogs starting to bark at the sudden noise. The papers that Take had collected on his table fell down slowly around him, drifting like snowflakes, in response to all of this sudden noise in his quiet and still house, Take’s face did not change at all.

  
“You told me everything, huh?”  
  
“...”  
  
“Arima had his reasons for not telling me, huh?”  
  
“...”

 

“I’m sure you had a good reason for keeping the garden for me so what was it? Tell me why? Why didn’t you tell me a single damn thing about the garden? How long did you know? How long did you know Hairu was suffering and didn’t lift a finger to help her?”  
  
“Did you…?”

 

  
Take’s question came out. His lips were pulled so tight into an unmoving line, Ui almost swore that he spoke without moving his mouth at all. He looked like a doll rather than a person, in that not a single feature of his face moved like they were all painted on.  
  
Seeing that perfect face of Hirako's, that beautiful face even now that seemed to carry an ever-present serenity, handsome features carved onto a sharp looking face with a small chin and steady eyes, Ui wanted to smash it apart. He wanted to break it. He wanted to cave that face in if that was the only way to get the other to show him some kind of expression. Show him that it was a human face and not a doll’s.  
  
Take was unmoving as ever. Ui wondered if Take ever felt guilt for carrying this secret for so long if he knew this day would come and he had been preparing for it because the way it looked it was like he had not given it a single thought. He only looked slightly annoyed that his breakfast had been destroyed.  Ui’s hands balled up against his shirt. “You were the one Arima chose. If you were the one Arima chose, then why didn’t you do something about the garden.”  
  
“I followed Arima’s orders. I had to guard the person he put his trust in.”  
  
“Then what about afterward! After the one-eyed king business! If you wanted to retire to the countryside and escape all this conflict why didn’t you bring Yusa with you?”

  
Take’s eyes looked past Ui. Even with Ui holding onto him so close, pushing him against the wall it was like he was not even there. If Ui wrapped his hands around his neck and started to choke, would the man in front of him see him? He had no idea at all. Take considered it for a moment. “Yusa stayed behind with the TSC.”  
  
“He’s a kid, he didn’t know any better. You were supposed to take him by the hand and drag him away from that place.”  
  
“I’m not someone who can guide others, apologies I never considered myself a hero like you. I’m merely an underling. If you wanted me to save someone you’re asking the wrong person.”  
  
“Heroes? Save someone? I’m not asking for that, I just want you to give a damn.” Ui looked into Hirako's eyes, even if there was nothing there he wanted to search for some small speck of light. “Afterwards, when we made up when we told each other about why we were fighting on different sides why didn’t you tell me about the garden? You, me, Hairu we were all on zero squads together, we fought together, shouldn’t we be friends? Why didn’t you tell me the truth about how a friend died, didn’t I deserve to know? Didn’t Hairu deserve to have somebody care about how she died?”

 

He yelled all those questions at him, but he might as well have been yelling them down an empty hallway. A mirror would have given him more of a reaction. The anger and spittle from Ui’s voice did not seem to change Take’s face at all. For a moment Ui wondered if he was lying to him still if he was putting on another mask just like Furuta did. If he was holding his faceless expression like that to further conceal something. If that was the case, Ui would prefer it. He hoped to Take was lying to him, that he was still lying, that he had a good reason for telling all these lies. If this was his genuine reaction, that was all the scarier.  
  
He assumed that Take had a good reason. It was scary if it was just a petty reason or even no reason at all. It was somehow more human that way too.  
  
Finally, after considering what seemed to be a long time, Take exhaled. Even though his face did not show it he put a lot of thought into his answer. “Were we ever friends? We ate together, drank together, you always found time to talk to me but those were things you decided on your own I went along with it. You decided that this was how friends interacted, you assumed we were friends because you were lonely and wanted a friend. Arima told me to take care of you so I did what I was obligated to.”  
  
He finally pushed Ui off of him, so he could step away from the wall. Instead of continuing to look at Ui, he bent down and began to clean up the broken plates off the ground still speaking as he did.  
  
“I acted like a friend, I think you were a friend of mine, but I’m not sure if those feelings are genuine. All I know is, I had no qualms at all about lying to you, and that time when we were fighting in the 24th ward I could have stopped you from fighting by telling you one single truth, and instead, I genuinely fought with the intention to kill you. I think, if Arima had ordered me to slit your throat because you were in the way I would have removed you.”

Those were the words of an underling. Someone who considered himself nothing more and nothing less than an underling.

“I don’t know what’s right without Arima around. If he’s not there, then I can’t feel it for myself.”  
  
“Can you feel this?”  
  
Take looked up suddenly with a curious eye, not really understanding even the emotions in Ui’s voice. Then suddenly Ui’s fist dug into his stomach and he punched him with everything he had. Take crumpled to the floor not resting at all, and Ui one more time kicked him in the gut.  
  
All Take did was curl up like an insect trying to avoid harm. Ui stopped and looked down at the other. “What did that feel like?”  
  
Hirako Take gave no answer. 


	4. The Killers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusa goes to a cafe with a boy for the first time. Art by Koyuki-tan!

Yusa Arima met the boy who killed his only two remaining… his… the last two members of Zero Squad besides him, Ui, and Take. Instead of taking revenge or shaking him down for answers, he let the boy go and returned to the chateau.   
  
He was too quiet, his life had become too quiet. He could not bring himself to do anything else. Living day to day was an oppressive silence that weighed down on him, it took everything he had. Except his body did not even know how to live properly, as he was slowly dying from simply aging. He was reminded of this as his snow-white hair fell in front of his eyes once more. 

He combed his bangs back with his fingers and went back to cleaning. The house was not going to clean itself after all. Yusa lifted the footrest Kuki Urie rested his feet on and then vacuumed underneath it. Urie was, as usual, reading the paper. His hobbies were reading, going over old case files, and painting, and besides that, he did not do much around the house besides linger there. Urie occasionally asked Saiko to learn how to cook like a proper housewife which told Yusa what Urie’s views were.    
  
Urie considered himself one of the old boy’s club that sits on top of the CCG, and on the escalator to reach that point just like his father was. His only friend Takeomi Kuroiwa was already much farther ahead, he had a wife and a child. Urie complained about that fact from time to time especially when Takeomi bothered him with invitations to dine with their family. Yusa got the distinct impression from the furtive glances Urie occasionally gave the side profile of his face when he thought Yusa was not looking though, that Urie would never catch up to Takeomi in that particular aspect of their rivalry. Urie did not seem the type to marry a woman at least. When he was not going through work even at home Urie would occasionally lie on the couch and complain about Mutsuki not ever calling the chateau enough. Yusa thought it polite not to mention that Urie could have simply called Mutsuki if he wanted to talk to him so badly. The end result of Yusa’s polite silence was that Urie spent long periods of time lying on the couch staring at the phone like a lovelorn teenager.    
  
The fact that Urie did not have much of a life outside of work though was typical from what Yusa heard of society. Apparently, a lot of salarymen acted this way, they went to work, and then came home to rest so they could work just as effectively the next day. Being a salaryman in soul-crushing apparently, and Yusa imagined being a salaryman for murder to be doubly soul-crushing. He had no frame of reference for what a normal job would be like though, so he had no idea what Urie would act like if he was trying to aggressively climb the ladder of a different workplace culture.    
  
It seemed futile either way to Yusa, but perhaps that was because Yusa would never be a member of the old boy’s club no matter how high ranking he got. For one due to his genetics he was not allowed to marry most likely, (at least it had been that way in the garden all marriages were pre-arranged for the kind of children they produced) and he would never be old either. 

 

“Yusa!”

Yusa considered just ignoring him for a moment but that would be rude, so he turned the vacuum off so Urie would not have to shout. He would still mutter half of what he said anyway, a childish habit he had failed to get rid of but Yusa did not feel like he could judge anyway. He was still quiet just like he was when he was a child. He had always hidden behind Take back then. If there was an adult that would stand in front of him he was sure he would hide in their shadow too, but after Take left Yusa had given up on the idea of adults actually caring about him. 

 

“Ah… um… yes…?” Yusa fumbled for words as Urie’s sanpaku eyes sharply glanced at him. Perhaps Urie had seen where Yusa ran off to last night and wanted to question him about letting Hajime go.    
  
“I heard from the main office that they were going to let you take up the Kishou name.”    
  
Kishou was not a birth name. In fact, as much as he had respected Arima Kishou Yusa had never once learned what his true name was. Instead, Kishou was a title passed down to the strongest member of the Arima house.    
  
The fact that the strongest member of the Arima branch family in generations also happened to be Tsuneyoshi’s direct son had been a cause of celebration amongst the Arima household in the garden, and Kishou’s original name had been forgotten a long time ago. At the time Yusa remembered feeling spiteful because the limited views of the main family that prided bloodline above all else to the point they enforced selective breeding on others were being validated in Arima’s success.    
  
Kishou… whoever he was before he became Kishou, never wished to become the main family’s success, the golden example of what a CCG agent and a V agent should be. 

  
“Oh, I see...” Yusa replied passively.   


“They told me you turned them down. Why is that? Isn’t it an honor to carry on the legacy of a relative of yours?” 

  
Urie probably was only thinking about himself at the moment. He had spent his entire life trying to climb his way back to his father’s former post as the leader of the S3 squad. 

  
Yusa stared forward trying to think of a proper response, an excuse to avoid Urie’s question without having to answer it with the truth. Avoidant, that was what he was. He knew what was wrong but also knew there was nothing he could do on his own to fix it. If the entire zero squads were still alive maybe, or even if it were just Rikai and Shio there with him, if Arima had not died so early, or if Take had stayed with him, perhaps he would have the strength to fix it. As he was though he was all alone, a lone survivor. He was aware, but he could not do anything about it, so he remained quiet, he averted his eyes, he pretended to simply be shy and distant.

If he was distant, from the problem, from others, it would probably hurt less, eventually, the pain would dull. They said no man was an island, but if he was not meant to live alone then why had everything been taken from him? If only he could be an island, completely still, far away from everything, the only motion he needed was the waves beating back and forth against his shore. 

  
As he kept staring forward the scent of flowers, that he could never wash off of him no matter how hard he tried, filled the air once more as he inhaled it. He was going to be suffocated by the pleasant and florid smells one day. Yusa stared down at his foot and saw he had stepped on a flower. A field of flowers bloomed in front of him.    
  
Yusa wondered why people ever associated flowers with pleasant memories. In the middle ages, people put flowers in the pockets of plague victims to cover up the stink of their sickness. That was the only thing Yusa could see flowers were for, for trying to hide the scent of blood and rot. Any field of pure white flowers was pointless, pure things were pointless because eventually, one splash of red would stain it forever. Once things were stained they could never be washed out either.    
  
The flowers he saw were not a carefully tended garden, it was a messy field of wildflowers. Whoever carelessly threw these seeds about did not care what happened to the flowers that grew at all. Some of them would grow far apart and never see each other, some of them would grow so close that they strangled one another with their roots, and some of them would be overtaken by weeds. Yet, there were so many flowers created not a single person would care if one or two was lost. If every flower wilted away and a sole flower, like a flower sprouting in the middle of the battlefield was all that remained. If a flower’s seeds were blown too far away and fell into a crack on the concrete, and grew from the small amount of rainwater that seeped in between the cracks, no one would think anything at all about how much it had struggled to live, how it would never get to spread its roots much farther than the single crack in the concrete it had made its home.    
  
When people saw flowers, all they saw was pretty things, the only saw the colored petals and never once looked at the roots under the surface. They never thought about how sad it was, how short-lived flowers were, most of them were only meant to live one season. All a flower needed was to be quiet and beautiful for a few brief moments to be appreciated. 

  
When Yusa thought of flowers, all he could think about was death. The time that he had seen a beautiful dead body lying amongst the flowers in the bottom of Cochlea.    
_  
_ _ “Squad leader Hirako… May we say our goodbyes to Arima?”  _

__  
_ “Yeah.” _ __  
__  
_ “Sob… hkkk… sob…” _ __  
__  
_ Shio had been a much louder crier than he was.  _ __  
__  
_ “Children of the garden. Kishou Arima was hope itself for them.” _ __  
__  
_ “Hirako… are you... “ _ __  
__  
_ “I… am a mere underling.” _ __  
__  
_ “The aged eagle. He who is old and wrinkled and tired of pain, of snow-white beard, of majestic attus he sharpens his makiri cross-legged. He trims the dead man's fingers and his mind clouds. O toiyan kuttari (thou who art laid out on the ground). All is good and I pray, I grow old and I lament. I am white, already gleaming. I fade ever so soon…” _ __  
  
Yusa remembered what Kaneki said at the time. They were pretty words. His heart was touched by them. Now he could not help but go back and think that anybody can say pretty words.    
  
Yusa remembered next to him Shio cried much louder than he did. Yusa was not even trying to sound tough, or not to cry. He just could not bring himself to be too loud. He had been quiet for so long. Rikai did not cry at all, and the other two zero squad members were just as silent. They all gathered around Arima and fell on their knees as if they were in reverent worship of him. 

  
Yusa would remember the way Arima’s face looked to this day. Arima hated living, he hated being alive, he hated having to kill. That was why no matter how well you did on the Zero Squad, no matter how many promotions you received he would never smile at you, he would never praise you, even though it was all you needed in the world. Everyone in the garden simply wished to become like Arima, that was all they could aspire to be, a ghoul investigator with great acclaim. However, despite living out the dream of everyone in the garden Arima himself never once enjoyed it, and then suddenly the dream end. In his death, Arima was smiling. 

 

As he lay there his white hair fallen all over his face, his head nestled in the flowers, and his large hands crossed over his chest, he looked especially beautiful. The peace he had longed or all of his life he had finally acquired in death. Part of Yusa wanted to be happy, that Arima who lived such an ugly life could finally be beautiful. 

  
The more he thought about it though the more it left Yusa at unease. Is that the reason they were born into this world? To be beautiful? For peace? If somebody said that people lived to strive to be beautiful.   
  
Yusa would say they were an idiot.    
He would rather be ugly.    
If Arima finally found meaning in his death.   
Then Yusa would rather life be completely meaningless.    
Beautiful words were like flowers, pointless decorations, worth nothing. He was happy that Arima seemed satisfied in his death, he really was, but it seemed the only thing Arima was satisfied with was himself. 

Kaneki told him later that Arima once said Kaneki was the only thing Arima had managed to give back to the world.    
  
Did that mean he never considered the zero squads he raised something he left behind? Were Rikai, Shio, Yusa, the two others, were they all just something meant to be stolen away too? If that was the case then it made sense, why Take had considered himself an underling. Why Take left him all alone in the CCG. Apparently, Arima had not even ordered Hirako to take care of Rikai, Shio and himself so he simply never followed the order. 

If Arima considered them worth protecting, if he thought they had hope, then that day that they stayed behind to fight Hajime would Shio and Rikai has lived with him? Perhaps the reason they died so easily, was because they considered their lives as disposable, lesser than the lives of the people they were protecting. If they had valued themselves a little more would they live? In that case, was the only reason he survived his own twisted self-value? Did he have no choice but to value only himself to continue living? 

The questions hung in the air never being answered, because Yusa never even gave a voice to them. He was too busy staring at the flowers, and two in particular who had been plucked, and their heads cut off by a pair of gardening scissors. If only they had a more careful gardener maybe those flowers could have bloomed more beautifully, but then again it did not matter much because flowers would only bloom for a short period of time and beauty was a shallow distraction anyway. 

Yusa realized he had gotten so distracted that he forgot to answer Urie’s question. The other boy was now staring incredulously at him.  He spoke in a distant voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not strong enough yet, so… I don’t think I’m worthy of that name.”    
  
“Oh. You should have more confidence in yourself Yusa. You’re plenty strong already (I’m the one who needs to make special class already, maybe then Mutsuki will…).”    
  
Yusa had just told Urie what he thought Urie wanted to hear. He did not actually care much about strength, not anymore at least. Arima had been the strongest of them all, and he still died. No matter how good he got at fighting that would not stop the slow biological breakdown of his body. 

 

“You should be more grateful though, being associated with Arima in the TSC is an honor.” 

  
Urie said, and that was true half the moves they used in combat were maneuvers named after Kishou Arima. Yusa’s face wrinkled a little bit. When he was sent into the 24th ward to kill, he was told he should have been grateful for getting the chance to prove himself. When he joined Zero Squad he was told he should be grateful for getting the chance to go above surface even if he had to hide his face all day. When Arima died, Take told him he should be grateful that Arima still left him with a purpose in protecting Kaneki, that Arima had thought of them. When he joined the chateau and killed again just like he did in zero squads, he was told he should be grateful for getting a chance to fight for the sake of humanity and protect others for once instead of needlessly slaughtering ghouls. Yusa was born with nothing, but he was told to be grateful for his entire life for the nothing that he had. 

 

“Of course I’m grateful. Thank you for your concern, Urie-Taichou.”    
  
Yusa worried for Urie a little bit though. He was probably only prodding him about it, because of his relationship to his own father. Yusa wondered if Urie’s father had wanted him to take over his position at the CCG, so he could be killed by the same job that killed his father. He thought of Arima who died without telling him if he ever wanted the garden children to be anything other than fighters, if he believed they could escape, or if they were destined to die fighting as he did. 

 

Yusa had always wanted to believe in Arima. He genuinely did believe that Arima’s dreams for the world far exceeded him as a person, that Arima wanted better even if he could not bring himself to be better. He no longer knew what those dreams were though.    
  
_ If your father wanted you to become an investigator when he was probably a bad father. I’m sorry.  _ Yusa would never say the words though, he simply kept them to himself swallowing them at the back of his throat. It felt like swallowing a moth. He went back to cleaning trying to keep it down as it fluttered its wings in his throat.  

 

💀

  
Yusa felt a bit odd walking in public with a black kendo sword case strapped around his back. People kept staring at him. Technically, he had snuck out and not filled the paperwork out for bringing out a quinque in public, which is why he kept his in a fabric case rather than a suitcase. The result of a boy walking around in a suit with a sword clearly hanging around his back was that he looked like he had stepped out of an anime. One where a white-haired teenage high schooler wearing a suit got in sword fights in public, probably.    
  
Not that he knew what high school was like because he had never gone, nor did he watch any anime. No matter how many times Saiko bugged him to do it. He used to enjoy getting glimpses of the outside world, but now that he knew he was never going to be a part of it he found it pointless to daydream.    
  
Anyway, it was awkward. None of them really cared about his situation, so they should stop staring at him now. A little awkwardness was better than coming to meet with Hajime again completely unarmed, so Yusa just dealt with it as he rode the subway.    
  
The place Hajime asked to meet him was a strange one. Yusa thought it would be in the sewers because he kept going on and on about that Nezumi name he was so proud of. Instead, the two of them met up in an open-air cafe. Yusa recognized this one because it was across the street from the cafe run by Maman’s wife, that Saiko was always bugging him to go with her too.    
  
When they met up, Haime smiled. “Oh, you brought a sword I’m so glad. Did you finally decide to kill me?” 

_ Don’t talk like that when we’re in public. Did anybody teach this brat some manners? Oh, he’s an orphan so I guess not.  _ The only show of that line of thought on his face was a slight twitching of his brows, and his mouth falling open to utter the syllable. “Uh...”

 

The last time Yusa has been unable to decide whether or not to kill him or answer any of the questions Hajime threw his way so he let him go.    
  
“Jeez, don’t give me that. You always look like you’re thinking way more than you actually say, so why don’t you just say it.”  
  
“I dunno…Maybe… I don’t like the sound of my voice as much as you seem to.”   
  
“Nishishi! See that’s funny! You should say more stuff like that. We can’t both play it like we’re the mysterious cool guy otherwise we won’t get anywhere at all.”   
  
“Oh… you’re supposed to be cool, I hadn’t noticed. Sorry…” He hid his sarcasm in his usual dreamy voice. Yusa found it odd, why of all people it was Hajime who first noticed he had much more to say that he ever let on to. He had been living with the people in that house for six years.    
  
The next thing he knew he was sitting, drinking tea and coffee with the boy who had killed Shio and Rikai. He heard the loud slurping as Hajime inhaled the coffee through a straw and Yusa himself tried to sip his tea as quietly as possible so they would not make any more noise.    
  
“I don’t understand. Why are Shio and Rikai dead and you still alive?” Yusa finally asked, when he could not take the loud straw sounds anymore.    
  
“Why am I still alive, what a philosophical question you’ve asked me.”    
  
“No, that’s not… ugh…”    
  
“Speak up a little more, Yusa dear. I can’t hear you.”   
  
“That’s because I’m not a loudmouth like you.”   
  
“If only you were a loud mouth. People would probably listen to you more.”    
  
Yusa was sure even if he screamed nobody would hear a sound. So it was better to stay quiet, even if it meant he had to feel the moth's wings flutter, flutter, flutter, and tickle him at the back of his throat the more he tried to swallow.    
  
“Can you get to the point already. You’re annoying to talk to.”   
  
“Awe, did you tell me your true feelings deep inside your heart. I’m so touched.” He picked up his coffee to sip at it again, and Yusa did not know what the more obnoxious noise coming from his mouth was. “Shio and Rikai are dead because I killed them, but why did that happen? Why did we fight? Wasn’t it Ui and Take who made the two of us fight each other.”    
  
“You would have tried to kill them either way even if Ui was not fighting against Hirako-san”    
  
“But still, wasn’t that the end result? Those two died fighting out Special Class Ui’s grudge against first-class Hirako. The adults made the children fight their battles for them. If Hirako cared about you three, why didn’t he make sure you three got away and he settles things with Ui himself? Or why didn’t he just tell Special Class Ui that he hadn’t betrayed Arima at all to stop the fight, why not try to explain himself?”   
  
“Is that all you have, useless questions? Asking all of those in retrospect won’t change the end result.”   
  
Yusa had enough of those for himself. He spent all day turning them around in his head. No matter how many times he asked them though God would give him no answer. He had already seen god die in a field of flowers.    
  
“Then how about this, why did you guys have to be the ones who fought to protect everyone in the first place?” 

“Miss… Miss Kaneki wanted to protect the children. Children must always be kept safe.”

“Weren’t we kids too? Children fighting against other children to protect children? Who was being kept safe? Who was being protected then?”

All Hajime did was spout confusing questions that Yusa was sure even Hajime did not know the answer too, but he would laugh knowingly like he already did to mock him. Yusa pulled his lip into a tight line not wanting to show anything on his face. “I… I was never a child.” 

  
“Is that so? I’m sorry you think that way, Yusa darling. Even I got to be a kid for a little while.”    
  
“Don’t call me Yusa or darling…” Yusa glared at him underneath the white locks of hair that had fallen in front of his face in his stress, “Since when did you become so wise anyway?” 

  
“Oh, you haven’t heard about my new promotion. I guess I should stop teasing you-”   
  
“You’re going to keep teasing me no matter what don’t lie.”   
  
“And explain to you about how I lived. Do you remember, there were eyeballs along the dragon’s body and when you cut them corpses came out?” 

Yusa remembered that scene visibly. When they had been fighting to the death against Ui, Take ducked behind one of the tentacles that emerged from the wall to dodge an otherwise fatal blow from Ui, which tore straight through the eyeball on the tentacle, pus, blood, and some unknown liquid sprayed everywhere and a child’s body fell out. Instead of eyes a nose, and a mouth, there were just holes in his face, a hollowed out child like its insides had rotted and melted away, with white hair like all color had been washed away. Yusa assumed he would end up like that one day if he kept living like this, slowly rotting out from the inside.    
  
“Mmm.”    
  
“Some of those eyeballs contained a massive influx of RC cells. It was just a matter of where you were caught up, at random, some of us had our entire bodies healed and brought back to life. As they began excavating dragon they found us, but they had no idea what to do with us. So, they reformed the black-suited investigators that once fought in the shadows and took care of icky jobs that the normal CCG could not attempt and for the TSC those of us that fight in the deepest parts of the twenty-fourth ward making risky missions to locate the other cores of dragon is made up of the former oggai squad and the former squad three who were devoured by dragon, to begin with.”    
  
“You got a second chance at life and you chose to go back to being an oggai?”   
  
“Who said we had a choice? Did you have a choice? Are you fighting for the TSC because you want to fight to protect all of humanity and the city of Tokyo now?” 

 

“I…”   
_ Don’t know what I want.  _ __  
_ Don’t know how to live any other life. _ __  
_ Don’t know anybody who would help me escape from here.  _ __  
_ Take didn’t help me find another way to live. He just left on his own.  _ _  
_ __ This was the only place I could go. 

“Jeez enough with the cute puppy dog eyes. We get it you’re sad.”   
  
“I’m not trying to be cute.”   
  
“That’s my point exactly though since we were brought back to life by dragon we all have strange properties, we’re risky, and there’s nowhere else for us to go. So the TSC doesn’t let us out of their sight.”  As Hajime said that, both of his eyes flashed red for a moment. Yusa understood, why he had not ordered any food, and why he was sipping black coffee even though he seemed to hate the bitter taste.    
  
“Do you miss eating candy?”    
  
“I dunno. I never ate candy. My parents said it was bad for my teeth.”    
  
“Okay.”   
  
“God, you always say okay to everything. Say something more interesting.”   
  
“Affirmative.”   
  
“No.”   
  
“Roger that.”   
  
“God, you’re so lukewarm.” Hajime spat coffee in his face, just to get a reaction out of him, but Yusa’s face did not change at all. He picked up a napkin and dabbed at the sides of both of his cheeks and then slicked his now wet hair back by combing it with his fingers.    
  
“So then… you’ve seen the TSC?”

Hajime knew what Yusa meant by that vague statement. He had seen the underbelly of the TSC. The united front to fight for humanity. It was just a machine in the end after all. Except this time instead of using humans, now ghouls were acceptable fodder as well and the target had been changed from the slaughter of ghouls to the slaughter of dragon orphans. As long as the machine existed, Yusa would be nothing more than a cog.    
  
“I’ve only seen it because I was forced to see. Those people who fight for their loved ones have it easy don’t you think? They can delude themselves into thinking they’re fighting for the right reason.” Hajime put his drink down. “It’s not the same for you and me, is it?” 

“I’m happy there are people who have loved ones to fight for. They’re nice, caring people.” 

“They only care about the people they’re personally invested in though. Caring about people in your own little circle isn’t that hard, what’s really hard I think… is caring about people outside of that…”

As his voice trailed off Hajime finally began to answer the question that Yusa had asked him. The question of why he had lived, while both Shio and Rikai died. That day Kaneki had suddenly lurched forward and ripped his face off in one bite, Hajime’s body fell backward and he murmured something about not being cute anymore while suddenly from nowhere a kagune shot forward into the cavity hole that was his face and stabbed, crushed, broke apart, twisted his flesh, destroying what little was left of Hajime. 

That should be the end, but suddenly out of nowhere kagune RC cells began to rapidly divide around Kaneki’s body. Hajime had no sensation of that time he was merely repeating the explanation he had heard. Slowly, he regained his senses, and he felt like he was completely submerged in water from all sides with so much pressure his chest wanted to cave in and he was unable to move. There was a thick meaty substance all around him and even though he did not have a nose, the smell of blood entered and overpowered his nasal cavity.    
  
He was stuck somewhere within the body of Dragon. He could not see or hear anything around him, he could twitch his body helplessly but the weight of the body of Dragon was so great it crushed his pathetic attempts to move. He was sinking, sinking further into a bottomless abyss. His entire body still felt like it had been shredded. There were cuts all over him, and every time dragon moved a little bit his body just got broken further. He was in pieces and yet somehow still aware of himself.    
  
All he could think of was how he had ended up just like his parents. He was going to be in so many pieces by the time he died that not a single person would recognize him, nobody would care. This all happened while he was aware, he could feel slowly being torn apart and his organs being rearranged, but he could do nothing to stop it, he could not even swim.   
  
He was drowning without dying, that was the inky black sensation that had consumed Hajime’s entire body. He wanted a single hand to pierce through the surface of the water. He wanted to see a single point of light in the distance. It was not fair, he had gotten the oggai surgery in order to fight, so he would be strong and never again be left all alone like what had happened when his parents were killed. He had done everything Furuta said, he had gotten strong, so why did he die exactly the same way his weak parents did? Why was he all alone now?    
  
He wanted to see the light that everybody else saw. They were all born into this world to live happy lives so why not him? Just because he had lost his parents… he was doomed? 

  
Then suddenly the surface of the water broke. Fingers dug into the dragon’s flesh and pulled it away. Above him, he heard a soft beeping. There was a woman there standing with a metal detector, apparently, it had gone off.    
  
Hajime opened his mouth and called out. “Please…. Mommy, daddy, please…” By then his face had regenerated though he had no idea what it looked like, and his hair had gone pure white. He reached up and tried to claw his way out of the dragon’s flesh. His head finally broke the surface and he saw a hand reaching out for him. Tears in his eyes  Hajime called out again. “Please, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t want to die like mommy and daddy did, please help me. It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts! Mommy daddy help me! You were supposed to protect me!”    
  
There was a woman holding a metal detector standing above him. Because of the metal tracker in his tongue, her metal detector had gone off and she had dug him part way out of the dragon at least enough to free his head. The moment she realized who it was though, she withdrew her hand.    
  
Hajime looked at the hand that he thought was going to save him. “You’re not Kaneki.” Touka had said and then turned away from him. “I have to go save him now, I’m sorry.” 

And Hajime was left crying alone, screaming for anyone who would help him escape this terrible pain that was crushing his body, only his head showing from the dragon, but it was days before anybody came to find him. 

“It’s a little embarrassing, what a crybaby brat I used to be…” Hajime said as he finished his story.    
  
“You’re still a brat.”   
  
Was all Yusa said as he raised his hand and called for the check. He had already decided then, he could not kill Hajime. Even if he despised Hajime, even if he hated what Hajime had done, even if Hajime was dangerous he could not do it because that would just create another dead kid. 

💀

That night Yusa did not get another break as he was called out by Urie for another extermination mission. This time the squad was Urie, himself, and Higemaru leaving the newbies behind. 

Yusa wanted to disappear into his work without thinking any more. That was why he told Urie he was going ahead and to cover his back. He disappeared further and further down the maze of tunnels. He only realized after it had gotten dark that he might have wandered too far away and lost sight of Urie, the squad leader might lecture him for that later.    
  
Yusa removed the katana shaped quinque from its sheath and made broad swings until he cornered the dragon orphan he was targeting. Then Yusa switched his grip so he could make stronger more precise swings. He was so used to this by now that the complicated battle maneuvers were automatic. To him, it was the same kind of thoughtless process that most people did to complete minor chores like shoveling snow. He was glad, he was glad he did not need to think, he just wanted to stay quiet and unseen.    
  
Then suddenly as he hacked off the dragon orphan’s arm, it cried out. “H-huuuuuuurts!” 

Was that?    
Human language?   
Japanese?   
  
It’s great big teeth chattered and the large eye on the side of its face approximately the same size as a squid eye started to well up with tears. “P-pleeeeeease! Pleeeassee huuuuuurts! ” The orphan in front of him screamed out.    
  
Yusa knew that it was probably just echoing the same noises it heard from humans who came down to these tunnels. It probably had no idea what those words meant, like a parrot copying human speech. It was just moving its vocal cords in a way that mocked the sounds it had heard before.    
  
It was just an intentional deception. The orphan in front of it was only doing this to make him drop his guard. Yusa tried to reassure himself of that, but he could not help but think about the lectures he had received from the garden in the past, about how ghouls were incapable of feeling human emotions and only used those emotions to deceive those who were trying to kill them.  
  
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeease! Huuuuuuuuuuurts!”   
  
The orphan in front of him cried out those two words like a five-year-old child who had hurt its knee. Yusa thought about Hajime screaming in the belly of dragon where nobody could hear him. Even when somebody had found him, they did not hear his cries or begging for mercy. They ignored a crying child because it was not their child.   
  
Yusa was an orphan, he was fighting a dragon orphan.    
  
He raised the sword in the air wanting to silence the crying in front of him. When he was much younger, the first ghoul he ever killed made such an awful noise, Yusa had stabbed it over and over again just to shut it up. He just wanted a moment of silence, a moment of peace just for once in his entire life.    
  
He just wanted to see the outside world, to live the quiet life that everybody else seemed to have. If he could have it with just one swing of the sword, how much closer would killing this dragon orphan bring him -  
  
He dropped his sword and the armless Orphan ran away from him. Urie would lecture him for that. It was bad to drop your quinque, and to show the enemy your back. Yusa no longer cared, he did not even bother to pick the quinque up. He hoped such a weapon would get lost.    
  
The boy rushed forward, running down the tunnel. Just as he had longed to so many years ago. He ran with everything he had into the darkness hoping he would get lost and never be found. He knew he was never going to make it to the outside world, but that was fine, if he did not see the Chateau again, if he did not see Hsiao’s hospital room, if he did not have to look at Hajime laughing at the top of his lungs like he wanted to cry when he did not mind being lost in those tunnels forever. 

“Shioooooooooooooooo!”

“Riiiiiiiiiikaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

He just wanted to go to where they were.    
He shouted louder than he ever had before in his life.   
As if he had been quiet his whole life because he was holding these screams in, for just this moment.    
  
“If Hajime survived are you still alive? Did dragon revive you? Where are you?”   
  
He just wanted to be with them.    
  
Yusa ran until he collapsed from exhaustion. As he lay on the floor on all fours he heard footsteps in the tunnel behind him. There were several dragon orphans approaching him. Now it seemed like a stupid idea, throwing his quinque away like that. 

  
“Can you talk? Do you understand what I’m saying?”    
  
He asked the dragon orphan leader at the head of the pack.   
Before it could open its mouth suddenly its head was cut off from behind. All of its followers were cut apart in quick succession. The person fighting wielded a quinque so elegantly it was like they were dancing with it.    
  
Yusa saw a flash of pink and then red as blood splashed across the ground. His eyes widened in disbelief.   
  
Hairu Ihei her face looking as soft and flushed with life as ever, all except for a nasty scar that went all the way around her neck, brought a finger to her pink lips. “Ah, I’m glad it’s you Yusa. Another garden child knows how to keep a secret.”   
  
  



	5. The Beautiful and the Damned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hairu can't eat melon bread anymore.

“You’re not like Arima…”

  
Take had told him, wrapping his arms around himself as he laid on the floor. Ui wondered if he was in that much pain he needed to clutch at his sides, or if he just wanted to feel a little bit of warmth from holding himself. When Ui had knocked him over, everything from his countertop had fallen over as well including a few papers that fell on the tiled floor.   
  
Perhaps at one-time Take crawled on the floor of the CCG like this and simply laid there holding onto himself. He was much like a bug, who had never left the cocoon of the institution that once gave him purpose. Even after Arima had died and Take tendered the resignation letter he was, as always, a subordinate of Arima Kishou, nothing more nothing less.

 

“Arima once told me this. You’re like me. You’ve got that same emptiness. It’s different for you, that’s why he couldn’t tell you those things.”

  
In following Arima’s orders, Take finally had a purpose. He had something to cling to, something to fill himself up with. He was no longer simply grasping at the empty air or trying to embrace nothing like he was at Ui’s feet at the moment.   
  
“You’re full of things unlike us, that’s why… Arima was like that. He could never understand people who were not like him. Even Sasaki was like him.”   
  
Koori Ui knelt down next to his friend. Even if Take believed that their friendship was only real on Ui’s part, he had decided to still call him a friend. Whatever he was seeing right now, it was probably the result of Hirako's isolation and loss. He was sure he was much worse than he had been six years ago too because that’s what the world did, it slowly chipped away at you. “Take-senpai, it’s odd… part of this sounds like Arima is the only thing you care about, but at the same time you don’t really sound like you like him.”   
  
Take’s hand slowly traveled to his face. “That’s how it was, wasn’t it? Anyone and everyone around him would work tirelessly for his cold praise. You were always upset about him, and he hurt you quite a lot by not trusting you no matter how hard you worked right? It’s the same, isn’t it… whether I liked him or not, that time at zero squads was the only time I felt alive.”   
  
“If you want to feel alive don’t spend all your time at a funeral parlor.” Ui offered a hand to help Take off the ground but Take refused to take it. He could not deny Take’s words, both of them were clinging to memories of the past in Zero Squad. Ui himself did not know if he was chasing this strange trail because it was the right thing to do or because it was the only slim chance of seeing Hairu again. If that was the case, then he could hardly bitch and moan about Take still acting like he was Arima’s underlying, because then right now he had not changed at all from the time he wore a black suit and willingly danced to Furuta’s puppet strings. He could not even say Furuta was puppeteering him, because he had tied the strings to his wrists and ankles himself.

 

Back then the sight of Hairu’s head floating in that tank had made a crack in his frozen heart. He thought if he could just get a glimpse of her smile if she could live one second longer from her premature end that would be enough for him. He just wanted to tell her that her life had been worth it, that she was born, she lived, there was at least one person who loved her in this world… but did he feel the same? It had been six years, and now his feelings back then were tied to the knowledge that guided by his own self-comfort he had been led to do terrible things.   
  
It was not for Hairu’s sake, nor Arima’s, it was never for them he was simply trying to ease his pain at being abandoned by both of them. He just wanted something to fight for, when he thought there was nothing left around him, so he easily bought into Furuta’s illusion. Even if Furuta led him to the edge of the cliff and danced around with him, it was Ui who threw himself off willingly, and with such gusto too.   
  
He should dull his feelings, they made him weak and foolish in the past. Even if seeing Hairu again would allow him to feel what he had felt in Zero Squad, the only time he had felt any happiness at all, he was not someone who deserved happiness anyway. All he could do was continue living to atone for what he did in the past.   
  
Sisyphus was punished for trying to defy death by pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down at the end of all his efforts. He was punished by chasing a pointless path. Then in that case that was what Ui thought he deserved, his atonement was not redemption, it was to live on struggling further trying to do good only to see all his efforts roll down the hill the moment it looked like he might succeed. The punishment was he could never give up, he could never stop hoping, he would still start pushing the boulder back up the hill again no matter how many times he had seen it all come tumbling down.   
  
As he came to that conclusion a police car’s alarms suddenly started to ring next to him. Ui stopped and held both of his hands out on his sides to make it clear he was not carrying anything other than a cigarette. When the officer told him to get rid of the cigarette, he grumbled and dropped it onto the sidewalk stomping on it.

  
“Those kill people you know.”   
  
“Well, so do bullets and I’m not giving you a lecture.”   
  
The TSC had been cooperating with the local police to locate him after Marude received a call about his unauthorized visit to Furuta. Ui turned himself in hoping to be brought directly to Marude.   
  
He had no affection for the man but they were coworkers at least and former special classes together who had worked with Arima for a long time. He would probably want to know the kind of life Arima had been leading. As he was escorted back up to the chairman’s office of the TSC’s first ward building, he received a special escort in Suzuya Juuzou. Ui felt like a celebrity.

“Ui, Ui, what did you do? You gave Marude four more wrinkles on his face I swear! It’s so unlike you to get called up to the principal’s office.”

  
Juuzou did not seem to be grasping the gravity of the situation, which was typical Juuzou behavior. Unlike Marude, Juuzou and Ui were friends as Ui was one of the few who did not make fun of Juuzou for his feminine looks when he started rising the ranks. No, that would be rather hypocritical on Ui’s part. The two of them had also once stolen Marude’s motorcycle and crashed it into the owl fight together, so he was sure that made them friends. Apparently, closer friends than he had been with Hirako who Ui used to consider his best friend.

 

“What are you talking about? I’m as rebellious as the next guy. Once I stole a horse from another farm in the middle of the night.”   
  
“No, no way! You were always lecturing us about following the rules. I always thought you were an uptight nerd.”   
  
“That’s just how I show my affection.”

  
Juuzou tapped the side of his cheek with his finger. “I see, then you must have loved us a whole lot.”   
  
By us, Juuzou was referring to the whole Juuzou squad, who were always around Juuzou so much they were basically a hive mind by this point. He had gone from a handpicked squad of outcasts to the leader of the S3 with those outcasts being his distinguished formal guard as if he were a conqueror from the warring states era. Even the dragon general was a bit too much of an old fashioned name even for someone like Ui who was in his mid-thirties and quickly becoming an old man to take seriously. Juuzou despite his current popularity within the bureau did know about being an outcast once. “Juuzou can I ask you something rude?”   
  
“Gosh Ui, you should know by now instead of trying to be polite you should just say rude things and then try to get away with it. Saying whatever you want and dealing with the consequences later is much easier.”

  
A very Juuzou likes thing to say. He always seemed to be following his own perspective of the world. “Did you know, Arima Kishou was raised by ghouls to kill other ghouls?”

 

“Huh…?”   
  
Juuzou was the next Arima, but he did not know anything at all about his predecessor. Even Ui did not know this about him recently, and he had been one of Arima’s closest student. “The Washuu that used to lead the CCG were ghouls, and Arima was one of them. A direct descendant of the former chairman. Not only Arima, but there were also lots of kids, they were raised from birth to fight for the CCG. Some of them are still being used for the TSC, do you think that’s right?”

 

A human, raised by ghouls to kill ghouls. A child was beaten and forced to kill until they lost all sense of empathy. What happened to Arima Kishou and what happened to Juuzou was too close to be called a coincidence. The world was repeating itself, tragedy after tragedy. Juuzou chewed on his finger for a moment, biting and pulling out one of the red strings knotted below his knuckle to think. “We-elllll, when they were forced to kill for the sake of ghouls that was probably pretty bad. It’s sad they were abused in the past just like I was, but if they’re working for the TSC now, then they must have been reformed. I’m sure they’re fighting for the right reasons now.”

  
Juuzou was reformed. Once he was a feral child who was just as willing to bite the hands that fed him as the ghouls they sent him after and did as he liked. Now that he acted like a proper TSC agent and only killed the dragon orphans he was pointed at, and the 24th ward ghouls they discovered during their raids when he was considered reformed.   
  
The idea did not occur to Juuzou, that he could live a life where he was not fighting. That he who had been forced to fight since he was a child deserved a chance to escape fighting. Of course it never even occurred to him, even his kindest mentors still believed fighting for the CCG was a good thing.   
  
“Of course Juuzou-kun, thank you for answering honestly.” Ui could not fault him, the great dragon general was still like a child who did not know better. He wondered if he was ever going to stop being a child.

 

Then again it was not his place to tell a child who had his childhood stolen away to grow up. In the past, he might have done so, but now he felt a pang of biting guilt in the pit of his stomach every time he remembered how he lectured the half-human Hairu and Arima to act more human.   
  
The two of them climbed the stairs and Ui was left alone in the office. Even if Juuzou escorted him there, he had not been handcuffed. Marude was probably treating this more like an intimidation tactic to convince him to stop looking into things rather than an official arrest or disciplinary action.   
  
Ui smirked thinking this may be the scene in the detective movie where the chief told the detective to stop being such a loose cannon, only for the detective to spit in their face and continue going on their own path. Ui did not think it would work out that way for him, he was not nearly cool enough to pull that kind of scene off.   
  
“Vice Chairman Ui, why did you make an unauthorized visit to our secret prisoner. Do you have lingering feelings for your former boss?”   
  
“He was a pretty shitty boss so no. If you’re going to use that line against me, I could ask if you have lingering feelings for the days your for your boss Yoshitoki.”

 

As he said that, the wrinkles under Marude’s eyes increased. Juuzou was right, he had given Marude more wrinkles. That was what he got for not employing proper skincare, Ui spent an hour on him every morning.   
  
“Besides, Furuta told me something important. Furuta. Arima, Hairu, all of the investigators that attended the sunlit garden academy were not orphans, they were-”   
  
“I know what they were. They were ghouls just like the Washuu.”   
  
The matter of fact way in which he spoke it, told Ui that he had known for a long time. “Then… if you know, what happened to them? Where are they now?”   
  
If Yusa was still there with the TSC, that meant he was born to be a CCG agent, and even after the CCG had died and reformed, he had lived his whole life being an investigator. Oh sorry, he was a peacekeeper now.   
  
“What do you think you’re going to get following this line of questioning? If you’re sympathizing with them you should know most garden children grew up to be v agents, the same ones who released a deadly virus on Tokyo for their own gain and wanted to do exactly what the Washuu had done to them to the rest of us.”   
  
Even if that was true they had been children once. Somebody had put a knife in their hands and told them to kill. There was probably a time that they broke down crying about it just like that boy who had stabbed his teacher in retaliation.   
  
“Furuta wiped out all of the adult males in his purge, and as for the children who were left behind the are currently being cared for by the TSC. They’re being raised the same way the Academy children are. The sunlit academy is no more.”   
  
“Then, they’re just going to become TSC agents their whole lives? If you know then why are you sitting on all this...Wait, wait, if you’ve known for six years, you could have used this to publicly decry the Washuu. You could have gotten even more government reform and oversight to the TSC. Hey, hey, if you’ve been aware of what kind of sick shit the Washuus did then why… why is that bastard Matsuri still running around calling himself Suzuki?”   
  
”What good do you think the public knowing would do? The government’s oversight would slow us down, and Dragon would advance even farther in devouring Tokyo.” He stood up then resting his hand on the corner of his desk. Rather than a general, he looked like a businessman, like the CEO of a company talking efficiency. “You misunderstand me, Vice Chair. I was fooled by the Washuu too for years, do you know how many of my men died because they manipulated me? Now, I have to keep their secrets for the sake of everybody. I want nothing more to expose the Washuu, but I’ve chosen to bear my own guilt as a burden because I have to protect the TSC.”   
  
Protect.   
  
“How do you think everybody would react if they found out who their hero Arima really was? The hope that he inspired would collapse.”   
  
Hope.   
  
To protect, he would lie, to spread hope he would continue to lie. Marude was suffering the most from his lies because he was a victim of the Washuu’s manipulation because he had been forced to get his hands dirty and fight their war for them. Marude’s guilt was genuine, he acted like he was carrying the whole tower the TSC had built upon his shoulders. He had sold his life to this work. Right or wrong it was all he had.

“I wasn’t manipulated. I chose to fight with Furuta. I’m living with my choices even if they were the wrong ones, even if they were selfish and deluded, how about you?” He looked at Marude wondering if he could say the same.   
  
Marude simply crossed his arms and averted his eyes. It was too bad Ui wanted to see how much his face would wrinkle more. “You’re just like Mado.”   
  
“Please don’t compare me to someone so unsavory.” Ui said, quickly and dismissively.    
  
“He never once listened to me when I asked him, but I’ll ask you the same thing. How far are you willing to go, for a one-sided love?” Marude asked. In his eyes Ui could not be on the side of justice or speaking of the right thing to do, he was only acting out a personal grudge.   
  
One sided?   
That made no sense.   
Mado was married, but then again his wife was mauled and there were only scraps of her left.   
She was beautiful, flawless, stronger than anyone else but even she died in combat.   
Once someone died your love for them became permanently one-sided.   
His feelings would never reach Hairu no matter where she was.   
Ever since the clock had struck midnight and the princess's fantasy came to an end.   
Her head toppled off.   
Ever since that day, his love would never be returned.   
His feelings did not leave him either.   
It was all terribly unfinished, like a story with no end like the pages had been torn out and were just hanging there.   
  
Is that what Marude thought this was all about? He was once again just trying to avenge Hairu. The same way Mado had avenged his wife was making ghouls into quinques. He had tiptoed the borderline during his time with Furuta, he killed, killed, killed trying to fill in that hole. He wanted to fight for something again, he wanted to fight or Hairu’s sake, so he threw everything he had into fighting. He smiled and his eyes went crooked.   
  
But the person who had stopped him, the person who told him it was impossible to get what he wanted and to give up was Furuta.   
  
“You’re wrong, I’m not a damn sadist. I just have some goddamn common decency and empathy. Anybody would tell you it’s a wrong thing to hide the garden, it’s like a politician’s sex scandal you’re keeping under wraps. You should make a formal announcement decrying what the Washuu did, the children of the garden shouldn’t have to live their whole lives thinking nobody cares about what happens to them.”   
  
“Which garden children then? The ones with V who killed so many of my officers? Should we throw a pity party for them too.”   
  
“How can you so easily draw the line between good garden children and bad ones? What happened to them… no human should have to deal with that good or bad.”

 

Marude finally slammed his hand on his desk. “Don’t cause a fuss any more than you already have.”  
  
An idea had already planted and took root in Ui’s brain. He had been grasping this entire time, what he wanted to do with this new information, find Hairu, follow Hajime, get information from Furuta, but now all of these distant seeds roots tangled together into his mind and a connected plan sprouted forth.

  
“You’ll regret not making an official release of this information when you had the chance. You’ll go down in history for suppressing all of this as well.”   
  
“Vice-chair, you can’t leak this information. There will be consequences that affect the entire TSC, not just you.”   
  
Ui turned around already leaving the office. “What are you going to do? Send an officer in a black suit to kill me to stop me? That’s what the Washuu would have done.”   
  
At that, the conversation ended. Ui chuckled to himself as he was thrown out of the office. It was the first time he had been able to laugh in days. The real reason he felt so relieved had nothing to do with his argument with Marude though. He cared much more about the no smoking sign that had been hanging in the man’s office. Now as he stepped into the outside world he was finally able to light a cigarette again.

 

Sucking on the poison of a cigarette was at least a more preferable thing then whatever Marude wanted him to swallow for the sake of the TSC.

 

💀

 

Furuta gave him one more piece of information, the location of the garden entrance on the same Washuu main house grounds that he had once committed his purge and slaughter of the main family.   
  
The area had been sealed off for six years for the purpose of investigation. The massive property holdings of the Washuu had transferred to the TSC by Matsuri’s wish. There was still caution tape sealing the area off.   
  
Ui thought he should go there before Marude decided whether or not he was going to simply fire Ui or arrest him to keep him quiet. He did not mind if he spent the rest of his life staring at the inside of a cell just like Furuta was right now, but before that, he wanted to see it, even if for one moment. He wanted to get a glimpse of the place which Hairu grew up. He did not know if such a thing would bring him anywhere close to her, but he thought Hairu deserved to have at least one person understand the pain she went through even if she really was still dead and those feelings would never reach her.   
  
He ducked under the caution tape. By now the sun had mostly set as Ui had once again to cross the districts of Tokyo to get here and take the train to do so. It was a good thing he had memorized the train routes a long time ago. He had been in such a rush to get here, feeling his time window to investigate narrowing on him that he did not bring a flashlight.   
  
Instead, he picked up his lighter from his pocket and flicked it on, and felt a bit clever and adventurous as he walked through the empty halls guided by a single tiny flame. The place smelled like old rot. He was sure the bodies that were once here as a result of Furuta’s purge had been cleaned out a long while ago, but their stench had already sunk into the floorboards. The wood that was built to make this place was probably rotten as well, down to the foundation.   
  
For a moment Ui wondered what Furuta had done to the women of the garden, the one ghoul females who were being bred. Even Marude had not mentioned them. Perhaps he had killed them all, that seemed like a Furuta thing to do. _If you die you’ll get cured._ Free them from a life of suffering. If they still lived, then the TSC definitely did not care about what they had gone through. Ui wondered if Furuta could bring himself to do it though, especially since his mother had been one of those females at one point.   
  
Furuta too, he had been a child once.   
Or perhaps he had never been a child.   
Or perhaps he never stopped being a child.   
  


Ui did not want to think about it anymore. He was wasting too many thoughts on the man who had screwed him over in the past. Ui wondered why he could not stop thinking about him when he had every reason not to care about him. Furuta was right, caring was a disgusting feeling, it was making Ui’s own skin start to crawl.  
  
There were dried blood stains on the floor from Furuta’s purge still. Even if the bodies had been moved, apparently they had not cleaned this place. They had let it sit here for six years the same way that everything else had been left to sit for six years.   
  
What Ui was looking for was not the main compound, but the doorway that was hidden within it. Following Furuta’s instructions in the maze-like compound, they were uncharacteristically honest for once and it led Ui to a great door. The sound of that great door closing and cutting off the world for the garden that had been hidden in the 24th ward must have been a thunderously loud sound. If the door was closed Ui would have no hope of getting it open, and he did not consider himself weak by any means, that was how large and heavy the door looked.   
  
When Ui reached it though, the door had already been left ajar. That was why he was able to slip through the crack that was left open, just for once he was thankful for his skinny waist and feminine hips he slipped right through. He did not think about why it was open at the time, perhaps he just thought Furuta left it open six years ago and everybody had been too lazy to close it.   
  
He descended once more down a spiral staircase that seemed as infinitely long as Cochlea’s descent had been. There was one more myth of a descent to the underworld, one native to Japan. When he reached the underworld, the god Izanagi found his wife Izanami had grown hideous, her body rotten, her eyes just empty sockets, a living corpse when he let a torch and saw her again. He turned and ran away in fear and sealed her back in the underworld.   
  
Both myths were the same, the moment they saw their loved ones again they disappeared. Ui’s heart was gripped by that sense, the moment someone died your love was forever unrequited. It would never be returned again. Even Okahira had warned him in the past that the dead were not meant to return.   
  
He did not care if Hairu was hideous, he did not care if she became a monster, if she was a monster it was the TSC that had made her into one. What he was afraid of was that just like Izanami, she would hate him now for looking for her when he was not supposed to, for holding that torch and seeing her true self.   
  
He had decided to deal with any punishment for upturning the rocks like this, but the one thing he did not know he could bear was to be hated by her.

He was not expecting love.  
Once someone died.   
Your love was permanently one-sided.   
He knew ever since that day that he saw her face disappear, her head falls off.   
That he would never see her smile and call out his name again.   
His love had disappeared that day, and it now forever belonged to her.   
His love was never returned in the first place.   
Hairu’s love always belonged to Arima.   
That was why he was not doing this for her sake, merely his own.   
He would no longer delude himself into thinking he was a knight.   
There was no princess waiting for him to rescue her.   
She had never even thought of him in the first place.   
He never entered her mind only Arima.   
No matter what his feelings would never reach her.   
That was why he could only do this for himself to resolve his own feelings.

The further he descended he louder his steps became, and the heavier, like gravity, was affecting him more. As he tried to calm his heart, and reassure himself he would not find anything at the end of his journey and temper his expectations, his heart only grew heavier.

His heart was racing, the same way it was when he threw himself into the conflict to create piles and piles of bodies for Furuta to stand on. Furuta told him every dead ghoul was more research they could turn to help Hairu’s revival around. He cut them all down and let them fall at his feet. His heart was racing like he was truly alive, after feeling nothing but loss for so long he was finally fighting to protect someone.   
  
He could do it, if he just killed enough he would bring Hairu back. He was not the person that failed to save her, if Hairu had been killed by a ghoul then he would kill every last ghoul to prove he was stronger than them, that no ghoul would ever take her away again. His heart raced, and the blood that pumped red behind his eyes became indistinguishable in color from the blood he was drenching all around him. He cut through ghoul after ghoul. Furuta told him to, Furuta told him this would bring Hairu back.   
  
The wish in his heart was impossible to grant. He had finally found something he wanted, after living his entire life empty. He just wanted to see that smile again. He did not need to be loved by her, as long as she smiled and called out that name that would be enough for him. He finally had a wish, but the moment he realized that wish it was too late, Hairu was already gone and she would never smile again, she would never be happy when she won the train station naming game, or bug him to play games with her, or skip next to him because she was so excited, or walk home with him or dance around the room, or draw her cute little drawings, or get impatient and fidgety, or pout when he lectured her, or taste melon bread ever again.   
  


Hairu had been born to die early, but she was so in love with so many things about being alive, and her love had been returned with a blade that cut straight into her heart, and then her head being horrifically mauled and rolling off of her shoulders.

  
Ui needed to stop himself though before he slipped into those feelings in the past. He lit a cigarette and bit hard on the other end forcing himself to taste something bitter to remind himself he did not deserve sweet things. All of those people he had killed, he had done it for himself, he had done it knowing there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that Hairu would come back.   
  
Perhaps he did want his wish to see that smile again granted, but he had no problem throwing himself at the feet of a god of death so he could throw the pain and the responsibility off his shoulders as well. Why else did people invent gods and weep at their feet, because life was heavy, and they wanted to escape the responsibility of it?   
  
For him, even a god of death was fine, so long as it was a god. Ever since he lost his previous god, after he disappeared in a flower field, in the belly of Cochlea. Now that he thought about it though, his previous god was a god of death as well.   
  
The moment Ui walked through the door at the bottom of the staircase, the shadows the hung over the abandoned Washuu compound was washed away by artificial light, so bright that it was blinding. Ui held an arm over his face and looked at the artificial light structures that hung from the ceiling and quickly figured out why it was called the sunlit garden.   
  
The first thing he noticed was that the dizzying lights had caused him to step off the path somewhat. He stepped into a bed of flowers, but when he looked down still clutching his lighter he saw that the flowers had withered away a long time ago. He wondered what the point was of growing flowers all the way down here.   
  
Bletilla striata flowers.   
Ui was sure he had seen Arima looking at a portrait of these flowers before in the CCG art festival, the one drawn by Hairu.   
In flower language it means.   
Do not forget about me.   
I will not forget about you.   
Let us not forget each other.   
Remember me. Even though I can no longer see the world.

Ui walked all the way to an old fashioned building with sliding doors. The building was as empty as the Washuu compound had been, he walked all the way through it and then sat on the porch letting his feet rest finally.

  


That was when he saw it. Amongst the flowers, there was one patch that had not withered away like someone was still caring for it after all this time. White orchids, the kind that Arima liked. Standing in the middle of them, there was a girl dressed in all white.   
  
Ui did not need to see her face. Even if her head had rolled off. He would know her. From the shape of her form, from the content of her soul. He knew her. If she had been reborn again in the next life, he would find her from the stuff her soul was made of.

At the end of spring when winter was approaching, most of the cherry blossoms had been blown away from the branches. All of its branches nearly barren the tree would look on the brink of death. However, there was always one cherry blossom clinging to the branch. A short-lived cherry blossom, the beauty of it was ephemeral, and it was always tied to its mortality. It was sad, unbelievably sad that beauty was always found tied in death.   
  
Most people believed cherry blossoms to be at their most beautiful, their most lively when they separated from the tree and danced about in the air. Perhaps that was a beautiful sight to see all of them at once being carried away by the breeze, but Ui always thought the dead branch left behind must have been lonely now that its cherry blossoms were gone and it could do nothing more but wither.   
  
That was why Ui thought the most beautiful part was not the moment the cherry blossoms all blew away, that beautiful moment of death, but rather when the cherry blossom was not in full bloom and it started to wither and fall from the tree. At that moment precisely when it was clinging to the branch, about to be blown away but still holding on to life, that was when Ui thought it's vitality shined the most.   
  
Even if the branch would be left all alone in a moment later, just for that moment the cherry blossom and the branch were able to cling to each other before it was blown to away to nowhere.

 _I can see you again tomorrow._ He had always thought that that was why he never stopped to look at the beautiful blossom that was always next to him, he thought as long as he kept walking along this pathway she would always be there. She was nothing more than a short-lived cherry blossom within his heart.

Now that he was left behind all alone, all he could do was break, be wounded, decay, and still keep on yearning.

As he saw the frills of pink of her hair, that was what his feelings of Hairu were to that moment. She was as beautiful as a cherry blossom that had been blown away from him once, all he could do was keep the memories of the moments she had clung to him in his heart. She was ephemeral, beautiful because she had disappeared from him so suddenly before he could ever properly appreciate her before he could ever tell her that at least one person was glad she had been born that she bloomed beautifully for him at least.

She was prettier than any flower, and those feelings had bloomed inside of him longer, and their roots had grown deeper, and deeper into his heart past his organs to the point where they could not be uprooted, even if an ice cold snow fell on top of him, even if he had been numbing himself for so long his feelings refused to stop blooming.   
  
Suddenly as Hairu caught his eye, she pulled her hood up over her face and the pink cherry blossoms of her hair disappeared. He had only glimpsed her, the faint outline of her, and a hint of pink around her through the branches. If she ran away now perhaps he would just think it an illusion he saw from staring into the past too much. She ran so fast and so sudden she kicked up flower petals in the small patch of garden that was still alive, maintained that way by her. She no longer cared anymore, she trampled over it recklessly kicking green patches and petals into the air.   
  
Ui had caught up to her and grabbed her arm. She suddenly realized she could not move forward anymore and looked underneath her hood to see him holding onto her. Suddenly, she got the idea of scaring him off. She opened her jaw and tore into his shoulder. Just like the flower petals, small petals of red were scattered behind her.   
  
Ui did not move, however, and because of her sudden forceful attack, the two of them fell together. They fell into the flower bed, kicking up even more greens and petals as they did all around them.

Hairu rolled on top of him and pushed his face into the ground. She hissed again, blood dripping from her lips, his blood that she had been so easily willing to tear free from his shoulder.   
  
“It doesn’t matter what you do to pretend you’re someone else, I’ll always know it’s you under there Hairu.”   
  
Ui spoke up, even with his body twisted around and knotted by her even with her on top of him, the two of them, their roots tangled together in the garden unable to separate themselves so close they might destroy each other.   
  
“How… how do you know?”   
  
He should not have even been down here.   
He should have forgotten about her as everybody else had.   
As he was so close to her at that moment, he stared up into her eyes almost as if he were spellbound. Ephemeral. Fae likes. Almost like she did not belong in this world. So distant and far apart from everybody else. But that was not true.   
Hairu had been a human all along, hiding the pain in her heart behind a smile.   
That was why Ui knew for sure.   
After all of this time, he still loved her.   
He had never stopped, not even once.

Even though it caused him nothing but pain to still carry these feelings with him.   
He had never stopped because the moment someone died your love belonged to them forever.   
  
“Nobody else is as beautiful as you. That’s how I’ll always know it’s you.”   
  
Saying a smooth line like that who was he kidding?   
Hairu did not laugh, she did not even smile, the ferocious face she was trying to make broke apart into tears.   
  
“You should never have come to find me, b-because…”

He knew, he already knew from the beginning.   
  
“I can’t eat melon bread with you anymore.”   
  
She said both of her eyes blood red like a ghoul. 


	6. From Death to Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hairu wants to practice smiling.

“Can I take a bite out of you?”   
  
“If you’re hungry then eat what we just killed.”    
  
“Ehhhhhh! That’s no good. I heard from the other squad that if you eat dragon meat you start to mutate.”   
  
“Then that’s all the more reason for you to mutate, maybe you’ll mutate a better personality or a better-looking face.”    
  
“I’m not even hungry enough to do any of that.”   
  
“Then why are you asking to take a bite out of me?”   
  
“So we can get married obviously!”

 

“No.”   
  
“Why not?”   
  
“Focus on your work.”    
  
“But we’re always working.”   
  
“Too bad for you, your love life died before it even had a chance to begin.” 

 

Their voices rose through the tunnel. It was a conversation that could take place anywhere between anyone. In fact, they did not even need to be given names. They could just as easily be Soldier A and Soldier B, or these days Ghoul A and Ghoul B. 

 

Ghoul A had a cheerful smile on his face. His hair was an overgrown light blue, a tangled mess of so many curls that he looked like a dandelion. His skin was pale, and his teeth a bright white which made the blood that had stained onto his cheek and the corner of his mouth all the more crimson in comparison. He reached up to wipe at it with the sleeve of the black coat he was wearing but all he accomplished was smearing it more.    
  
When he was alive he had been known as Ihei Shio, a distant cousin of the Ihei branch.    
  
Ghoul B frown at Ihei’s inability to keep clean. She smacked his sleeve away from his face, and then grabbed both of the sides of his rounded cheeks and pulled his smiling face to its limit of stretchiness as she stretched out his cheeks. Then, she drew her tongue out and licked the stain of fresh blood off of his cheeks. 

  
When she was alive, she had been known as Souzu Rikai, the only living member of the Souzu family one of the branch families of the Washuu clan. If what she was doing now could be called living, then she was the sole survivor of her branch. 

 

Shio had the look of a lion cub about him, curious and eager to pounce. As Rikai fussed over making sure he kept clean, he squirmed in her grip. Rikai was just superstitious, after all slipping on a puddle of blood at a critical time had brought an end to both of the members of the Ihei house, Hairu and then Shio. There was something bestial about this, she felt like another lion cub licking his wounds. She did not see it as particularly intimate, not the same way that Shio did.    
  
Shio finally released himself from her grip and looked around the tunnels they were in. “Quit that already! There’s no use in staying clean if we’re just going to get dirty all over again.” He was just pouting however from Rikai’s latest rejection. The boy did not seem to grasp the mood of the dark, and slimy sewers they were crawling around. He was beaming radiantly. Perhaps because he was a lion cub, that meant one day he would grow up into a predator, hunting came second nature to him.   
  
Shio had been born into the garden a breeding grounds for illegitimate children who were raised as soldiers against ghouls, he had been threatened by Kaiko that if he did not perform well he would never get a chance to make rank as a ghoul investigator and would spend the rest of his life as a faceless v agent instead. He did missions for the garden, he was let out of the garden and did missions for zero squads, he betrayed the CCG and followed Ken Kaneki, he was born, died, was born again, and then returned to the CCG and found himself exactly where he started. 

  
Shio did not mind too much though. He had never tasted freedom, so he did not even know what he was missing. Life went by too fast for him and he had little control, so he surrendered what little he had and decided to go along for the ride. If he had been born to be a killer, then he might as well embrace it and enjoy his role. His friend Yusa (they were allowed to have friends right? He probably had earned it he was pretty strong by now) always seemed to struggle and hesitate with things that came second nature to Shio. Yusa was always gloomy, and Shio wanted to enjoy what little he could. Oh, but Yusa was always fun to have around, unlike Rikai no matter how much Shio ran his mouth Yusa would always listen to him. 

  
What he was doing now, whack a mole operations in the 24th ward to keep the population of dragon orphans under control was no different from what he did in the past. He thought it was no big deal, he never minded the work, because it was exactly what he did before in the garden.

  
Sometimes when Shio did well he would even get praised. Since Arima was no longer around though, nowadays he was hoping Rikai would praise him. He had a habit of showing off in front of her. No matter how many cool new tricks he invented with a combination of quinque and kagune, she never seemed impressed at all. 

If Yusa always hesitated and Shio embraced it, then Rikai felt nothing about killing. No matter how much Shio tried to show off for her, she never smiled in their current predicament. That was the only thing that worried Shio. He was fine living a life like this as long as Rikai was by his side, but he had no idea if it was the same for her.    
  
The tunnels were particularly dark because they were only allowed to explore unmarked areas of the 24th ward. They did not want to be seen by the other members of the TSC, the ones who were official, with names, homes, and everything. They lived in barracks just like they had when they were with the garden and the CCG, oh but this time a friendly doctor checked up on them every week. What was her name again? Shio thought it might have been the word for future. It was a nice sounding name, and that lady always smiled at him with such fascination.    
  
“Hey, Nezumi hasn’t been around for a while. Do you think he’s skipping out on missions again?” 

 

“I can’t believe you agreed to start calling him that dumb name.” Rikai sighed as she turned around. “Don’t get too chummy with him.”    
  
Shio folded his hands behind his head and sped up to catch up to her. He was always careful to walk right by her side in case they were ambushed. Perhaps it was odd to call the person who had killed you by such a friendly nickname, but the way Shio thought about it he had been almost killed by a lot of people before. He fought several times with the Aogiri ghouls, only for Kaneki to tell him to get along with those same ghouls when they were in goat. The way he figured, since everybody was fighting hard to survive, then there was no need to hold fighting to the death once or twice against another person.    
  
“Why can’t I? It’s not like we have many other friends.” 

  
Their current barracks were full with the oggai who had been revived at random, the two of them who were revived coincidentally by Dragon, the Okahiras, and the survivors of division three who were ghoulified that day after being eaten by Dragon in the 24th ward. Not all one hundred of the oggai had been revived, just a random amount, the same for those who were present in the 24th ward. Since it was so random it was like they had all been thrown together, they cooperated for the sake of survival and not much else.    
  
They were considered special subjects by the TSC, not quite ghouls, and no longer humans either, biologically closer to the dragon orphans than anything else and because of that they could not be allowed to freely roam in the rest of the world. Shio did not mind that either, even if he were free he would have nowhere to go.    
  
At least here he had work to do, and it was the same work he had done all his life so it was easy for him. Maybe not easy but he was used to it, and wasn’t that the same thing? Wasn’t happy just getting used to the pain? 

“Besides you’re the one who was talking with him the other day,” Shio said, his cheeks puffing with a jealous pout as he side-eyed her.    
  
“That’s because I wanted to him to deliver something to Yusa for his birthday.” 

 

“Ah, it was his birthday, right? Oh no, I didn’t get him anything!” 

 

“I can’t believe you forgot. Really, what a hopeless child you are.”   
  
“Hey, it’s not fair I barely remember my own birthday! It’s not like we had anything to celebrate about being born anyways.’ Shio said that incredibly sad phrase with a smile on his face like it was a joke. He did not seem to grasp the inherent sadness, he thought he was just being an airhead again. “I’m not good at that kind of thing, Yusa was the one who knew everything about the real world. What do you do on birthdays again? You eat cake right, and then you set it on fire and try to blow out the fire so the cake doesn’t burn?”    
  
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth thinking about because we can’t eat cake anymore anyway. We’re not human-” 

  
Shio saw a scowl form on Rikai’s face and he interrupted her, the black coat over his shoulder tore and suddenly a thick purple organ rushed out forming from nowhere and wrapping around his arm until it reached the tip of his finger in the point of a sword. He poked Rikai lightly with his finger teasingly waving the kagune in her face. “We were never human. So what does it matter?” 

  
A kagune grew from the bottom of Rikai’s spine like a tail, her two coattails were thrown up as the tail suddenly rushed forward and knocked Shio’s kagune covered arm out of range and away from her. “Don’t use your kagune so easily. We’re not even supposed to have these.”

  
“Well, if we had been born proper half ghouls we would have grown kagune. Do you think these were the kagune we would have grown or dragon just gave us these at random?” Shio asked as his kagune disappeared into a blood mist.    
  
It was a good question but Rikai knew that Shio was not seriously thinking about this because he was not one to think at all. It had probably just popped into his head at random, and he would forget about it soon enough. “I told Hajime to deliver flowers to Yusa from me.”

  
“Eh, why???”   
  
“To make you jealous.”    
  
  


“Are you serious? Yusa probably wouldn’t even appreciate flowers he’d just get all moody about it! If you gave me flowers I’d take care of them and keep them alive for the rest of my life! I’d plant a whole garden with the seeds from those flowers! Viva la flower!” Shio threw his hands up in the air behind her as he started to whine.    
  
Finally, Rikai smiled to herself turning her head away somewhere Shio could not see. She was only joking, she said that knowing he would throw a fit a pout for a little while. Ever since the two of them had revived, all Shio had had in this world was Rikai, and all Rikai had was Shio.    
  
Shio was so full of affection and appreciation for everything, even the meager scraps he was given in life. Rikai wondered sometimes if that was just an Ihei branch trait. As he got older he started to confess feelings for her. They were cheap confessions, every time she asked him the reason why he gave her silly reasons, the way she smiled, the way she laughed, how kind she was. She knew that was just Shio’s romanticist perspective of the world, because Rikai herself never smiled, never laughed, and she was always curt and sharp-tongued with him.    
  
Perhaps he saw her in a light that she was never able to see herself. Perhaps that was what it was like to be a romanticist in love with the world. 

 

“Rikai, I’ll make Miso Soup for you every day!” 

 

His high pitched still boyish voice even though they had grown up together for six years now had interrupted her train of thought. She just happened to be thinking about him too, but it was not like she wasted that much time thinking about him okay? It was rude of him to barge in and trample all over her thoughts like this.    
  
“We can’t even eat Miso Soup so no thank you,” Rikai said, coldly turning him down again.   
  
She did not dislike Shio’s feelings. In fact, she thought it was a fun little game, hearing his cheap confessions over and over again and seeing how little he was dejected when she ignored them or rebuked them. It was like they were a pair of lion cubs, play fighting in the grass playing at a real relationship. Shio’s affections had something of a childhood crush he refused to let go of in them. 

  
One day under normal circumstances they might have matured in a mutual relationship, as the two of them grew up together but that was exactly the catch. Neither of them was ever going to grow up. Even if six years had passed, even if they had been cured of their condition from Dragon so to speak, Rikai was waiting for the other sword hanging above her head to fall down.   
  
Garden children were not allowed to grow up. Even if they lived until they were old and grey together, the two of them would never grow up, the world would not let them, they would remain, children of the garden, their entire lives. 

 

The real reason why she told Hajime to give Yusa that flower was because she knew she would die in these pits. A child unable to escape the egg they were born in, slowly suffocates inside of its shell.    
  
Not that she particularly minded. When Yusa and Shio were clinging onto Arima’s body, crying over him Rikai was the only one who had not cried. She sat in the background holding her two hands against the hem of her coat watching. Her face was entirely still, still as the death on Arima’s.    
  
That was because she thought it was useless to cry. You should only cry when you were upset, and Rikai had no reason to be upset. Arima never promised them they would escape from the garden, he never foolishly told them they would live. He was their hope, he was the best among them, and because of that, he had been given such a beautiful ending.    
  
The Arima they loved so much was finally at peace. If they all loved him, then they should have been happy that he was happy like this. The happiness Arima could not find in life, he found it in his death, she remembered his pale smiling face, it looked so perfect like it was carved out of marble to symbolize one of the gods. Arima even got to die in the arms of a loved one, it was a better death than slowly wasting away at least.    
  
Rikai in comparison had died in quite a sloppy and messy way. It was her own fault for being so foolish though, Take told them to keep a cool head and treat the kid in front of them like he was any other ghoul. Shio was the most ruthless among them, but that was only when it came to faceless ghouls, the more he got to know a person the more he held back. That was why he slipped on the bloody floor and left that opening for Hajime. As for Rikai herself, her foolishness was not realizing how much she cared about Shio until it was too late. The moment she saw his head roll off his shoulders something inside of her snapped and she broke formation to rush at Hajime. She brought her quinque above her head forgetting how the weapon worked and just wanting to bludgeon Hajime with it. 

 

_ Ah, I guess I cared about him this much after all.  _ She remembered as she suddenly lost all control of herself those were the last clear thoughts in her head as she tried to break, kill, maim, shatter, destroy, gut, rip, tear-apart, smash, until there was nothing left, until the person who had killed Shio disappeared, or until she disappeared and then suddenly her own vision cut off of the world too.    
  
She had been knocked down and she saw Shio’s body on the ground in front of her. She could no longer swing a quinque so her hand reached forward, groping around until she found his hand and laid hers on top of it.    
  
She guessed she died after that. A severed head was an odd way to die as she saw her own body lifelessly shuffle forward for a moment without her while her head and vision of the world fell back with it. She did not think of anything really, but she felt relieved. Living without Shio would have been a pain anyway.    
  
Then sometime later after both of their bodies were devoured, they fell out of the disgusting eyeball like sacs together. The first thing Rikai thought as soon as her body could process thoughts again as  _ I should have stayed dead.  _ It was not like she had escaped into a new and better life, she had just been reborn into the old one. She had prolonged her suffering. That was all this revival was.    
  
Even so, she crawled over to Shio’s side and slapped his cheeks lightly until he woke up. While she felt nothing at all about her continuing to live, she was glad Shio was alive. Perhaps that was selfish of her. The thought of living on without Shio was unbearable, but she wanted Shio to keep living even without her.    
  
She had one wish now, to be remembered. They were not going to live long, they could leave no mark on this world by themselves, as weakened and poorly tended to flowers doomed to wilt there was nothing they could do on their own. That was why she thought, if Yusa remembered them, together they could leave some small mark. Even after the flowers had died and their roots rotted away, someone would remember that they were once part of a colorful bloom.    
  
That was why she told Hajime to send that flower to Yusa and remind him of their existence. They were not allowed direct contact with the living, but Hajime found ways around the rules that the two good children of the garden Shio and Rikai conditioned all their lives to obey never could.    
  
“If Yusa figures out we’re still alive what do you think he’ll do?”   
  
“Maybe he’ll come to kill us. We’re ghouls now after all.”    
  
“No way he wouldn’t do that!” Rikai had meant it as a joke but Shio had gotten upset. She had been told her sense of humor was macabre, dying once will do that to you. Shio got in her face with all of his puffed up bravadoes. “Yusa will come to save us from this, I know he will!” 

  
“Save us? We’re just killing under orders as we’ve always done since we were kids, there’s nothing to save us from. This isn’t a fairy tale, Shio. People don’t get saved by swooping in, defeating a villain and running away with them.”    
  
“Awe, why isn’t it a fairy tale! Then I could be a prince and you could be a princess and we’d get married and live happily ever after.”   
  
“What about Yusa? Are you forgetting about him, how cruel.”   
  
“Well, he can be the horse!” 

 

She did not dislike those feelings of his, but they were strong and Rikai herself was quite weak. She had no experience in the world, and her world itself was quite narrow. All that consisted of it was her experiences as a garden child, and now the time she shared with Shio. A world consisting of two people, but at any moment it could crumble because neither of them had been saved by dragon from their eventual fate as garden children, they were simply being allowed to live by the TSC. As worlds went her world was as fragile as they came. If she accepted Shio’s love for her, the weight might be too much, and her world would crumble under that pressure.    
  
She had no idea who Rikai was. If she did anything other than kill she had no idea what that would entail. Yet Shio loved her anyway. He saw things in her that she did not see in herself. If she accepted that love she might start to change, to see herself in a different way.   
  
She did not want that, because it took everything she had to simply remain afloat, to make it from day to day. She was quite comfortable in her sad and empty life. She did not want to fill it with anything precious, because those precious things might crumble away.    
  
She wanted to remain separate and alone, she wanted to remain cold, because as long as she did that she knew who she was. Even if it meant being stuck as a garden child her whole life, at least she knew what that meant. Shio’s love for her might make her disappear. His warmth might melt her.   
  
That was why every time he took a step closer to her, she took a step away. It became a dance between the two of them. If he got in her face she would grab him by the cheek and force him aside. Shio was not deterred at all either no matter how much she distanced herself, she got the sense that he realized the game they were playing too and for him, it was enough just to have fun with her.   
  
She did not understand it, how any part of herself could be enough for anyone. No matter how many times she thought about it she concluded she would never understand it.    
  
“Catch up already you two!” 

  
An order came from farther down the depths of the 24th ward tunnel. Rikai recognized Ihei Hairu’s voice. She must have let herself get distracted by Shio again for too long if they were behind with work.    
  
Shio suddenly grabbed her by the hand and began to pull her forward. Rikai did not look too happy about it, but if she really wanted to she could have torn her hand away from him. The fact that she kept clinging to that hand and let him pull her forward must have meant something. 

 

💀

 

That conversation had taken place a few days ago. Now, both Rikai and Shio noticed it was Hairu who had gotten lost from them on this day’s mission. Rikai thought spaciness must have been another Ihei genetic trait. Shio always had his head in the clouds in a way that he would lose it if it was not attached (which was why she was grateful he had found it after it being unattached the first time), and Hairu seemed to wander off. Rikai saw the direction that Hairu disappeared off to but had no idea why she would go there.    
  
That direction was the garden, or at least what remained of it after Furuta’s purge. It would be like going through a ghost town, or perhaps a mausoleum. Then it was even more pointless because garden children were never given graves when they passed on.    
  


Of them Hairu adjusted to becoming a ghoul the easiest, but different in a way that Shio did. Shio was someone who could make the best of anything. He was trying to enjoy himself even crawling around in the sewers like this. He always played games when they were on missions and showed off trying to make the fighting they were doing cool. He was like a child that did not know any better.   
  
But there was something empty about the way Hairu lived now. It was like she did not feel any pain for her current condition because she did not feel anything at all. A hole had opened inside of her and she emptied out, or perhaps she had been empty all along and she had only just now realized it.    
  
It was just random chance that brought them all back. Apparently, their corpses both hers and Arima’s had been tossed into the belly of Dragon when it began its first rapid expansion, brought down to the twenty-fourth ward by Furuta during the goat headquarters raid to fulfill his promise to Ui.    
  
However, just by chance Hairu revived and Arima did not. She woke up to find her neck reattached and Arima’s body next to hers rotted away and half ate and defiled by Dragon. The sight of it must have broken her. As she did not say anything or join the fight even though she could see Furuta in the distance at the far end of the trash, and corpse-filled battlefield. All she did was climb to the edge of where she had woken up and hugged her own knees, waiting silently until someone came to recover her.    
  
Her life was nothing but bloodshed, but Arima was the hope of the garden. If he could acknowledge her maybe there was hope for her too. After all, Arima was stronger than anybody else, and it was because he was so strong he was able to be kind. Once unlike everybody else who ignored her in the garden he reached out and put a hand on her head. She wanted to be strong like Arima so she could be kind too, and so she could experience the world’s kindness, and she had to work hard because her time was so much more limited compared to everyone else.    
  
She had worked really hard and at the end of it not a single word of praise, her reward was a brutal and gory death that had destroyed everything about her once pretty body. They called her a princess but she was nothing like a princess. She wanted to be, she wanted to be kind, delicate, and as gentle as the princesses that appeared in stories. However, she was nothing like snow white, her lips were as red as blood because they had been stained that way from the people she killed. She much more resembled the ogres in stories that devoured people than she did the princesses who needed to be saved. Especially with what she had become now.    
  
Hairu realized what had hurt her so much in life was her desire for praise. Desiring caused her nothing but pain, and at the end, she never saw any of her desires bear fruit. So she just decided to give up on them. Her life was going to amount to nothing so she accepted that, this emptiness inside of her was not so bad in that regard.    
  
She had been sent on plenty of missions now, and in the past when she tore ghouls into pieces she was always pinpricked with excitement that this time she had done enough, she had shown Arima that she was enough for him. Now she no longer needed to worry about that. She felt nothing at all, no guilt from fighting, no hesitation and as she hacked the dragon orphans into bloody pieces if they managed to get a hit in on her she felt no pain either. She would just keep swinging her quinque until what was in front of her stopped moving. 

  
This was a wonderful way to live. She did not need to be saved from that.    
  
Really, she was neither a ghoul for a human, she was just like those dragon orphans being driven on by instinct to kill what was in front of them. She envied how simple and childlike they were seemingly innocent to their situation. She wondered if there was ever a time she herself had been innocent. 

 

When she died she saw Arima standing in a field of flowers, holding his hand over her head. She saw the reaper, he was beautiful. It was like he had come to welcome her in death. It was the only time she remembered being happy.    
  
  


She wondered if she had ever been given a chance for happiness in life if she was born with a chance to be happy like that.    
  
As much as she tried to empty herself out though she found herself doing peculiar things. The garden was mostly abandoned and all the flowers from her youth had died off, so she replanted it with seeds she requested and started to occasionally sneak away to tend to it.    
  
That turned out to be a mistake. Imitating a human in that one small way had turned out to be a mistake, because on that day, in the same garden just by coincidence the two of them had found each other again and locked eyes. 

  
They fell into the flowers, picking up the flower bed as they did. Hairu had no such wish to be held onto by him like that in a field of flowers, all she could think of was how to best make him go away.    
  
She wanted to be forgotten, to be empty because the alternative feeling everything she had lost was too much for her. She had nothing, to begin within the first place. It was cruel to take away from someone who had nothing, to make them lose things they never thought they could lose, to make them live with even less than they had before.    
  
She pushed UI off of her finally after telling him she could not eat melon bread anymore and decided to show him. The black jacket she was wearing tore, and two pink kagune spread forth like wings from her back. His entire shoulder became torn apart by kagune shards. Hairu used that opening to get away from him.    
  
She saw his hand still fumbling to reach after her as she ran away, but did not let that stop her for a second. She ran into the maze of tunnels that unfolded from the garden. She knew the pathways better than he did, she had been coming here, again and again, to kill ghouls since childhood.    
  
That should have been enough to lose him, but her own legs were working against her. She found herself getting lost in a maze she already knew. Even with a significant head start, he caught up with her. 

  
Hairu fell to her knees in front of him. Her head slowly rolled around her shoulder, it looked so precariously attached that it might roll off again, perhaps that was what she wished for.    
  


Ui was carrying one of the katanas that were left in the wreckage of the garden. The Washuu did love their historical weaponry. However, the sight of Ui holding a weapon and approaching her made her smile. 

 

“Ui… don’t come and find me, don’t save me.”   
  
“Why not?”    
  
“Because... The way to save me is something you’re far too kind to do.” She said as she eyed the katana in his hands, and touched the scars that went all the way around her neck. 

  
If one day she woke up and everything in this life had been a dream.   
If she woke up in completely normal life.   
If she was told she could live.    
She would buy a small mirror and practice smiling on her own.    
She would practice over and over, so she could smile for things other than bloodshed.    
If they told her she could live without hurting anyone anymore, she would grow her hair out longer and let her hair sway in the wind. She only kept it short because she needed to fight.   
The next time she was born into this world, she would like to be born as someone more clever than she was now. Maybe that time she would make something more of her life rather than being played like a fool.   
She wanted to live a life where she could give feelings to other people.    
Where she could have them returned without having to earn them.   
And that was why she was in pain now.    
But there was nothing she could do about it now.    
And that’s why she kind of hated herself. 

That’s why she did not think she deserved even to dream happily like that.    
It had been a mistake, just like she was.    
  
“You know I killed a lot of people for no reason at all. I knew all along they were ghouls just like me, I didn’t think I was doing the right thing like you were. I just wanted to be loved, but there was no one…”   
  


She saw the image of Arima in front of her. Hairu reached out for a moment, but he turned his back to her, he showed her the coldness of his back while he walked away. He walked away somewhere she could not follow leaving her alone.    
  
“What the hell is that? You can’t live because there’s no one to love you? Why are you spouting that nonsense just like Hajime!”   
  
Hairu picked up the quinque that she held at her side as she stood up once more. There was an easy way to make Ui stop following her, all she needed to do was break both of his legs. She rushed towards him and the two of them engaged in a violent dance.    
  
They had sparred like this before for practice, and while Hairu was more talented Ui was far more experienced than her and never had either of them gained a clear edge over the other. They traded glancing blows like it was nothing.    
  
“Who cares if you’re miserable! Who cares if you’re a terrible person! Nobody said that you can’t live! There are plenty of miserable people in the world who keep living and making the same mistakes over and over again, so why don’t you join them?”   
  
Ui’s strange optimism was just another weight crushing her. 

  
“Everything’s awful.”   
  
“If everything is awful then why would you want to die now? Wait until things are a little less awful.”   
  
“It won’t ever be. Everything will stay the same just like this, I’ll keep suffering through just like this.”   
  
“How do you know you stupid airhead! So what if you were kept in this little garden your entire life, so what if you can’t escape even now, how does a stupid little girl like you think she knows that nothing is going to get better when she hasn’t seen anything of the world!”

  
“You’re the one who doesn’t know anything, Koori-senpai.” She said as she caught his blade finally, as their quinques dragged across each other they met each other’s eyes. Hairu let her voice fall to a whisper, but her words were harsh and sharp enough to cut straight through him. “You don’t how much I’m hurting right now, because you’ve never even loved anybody.” 

  
Whatever strings had been guiding Ui his entire life like a puppet, his knowledge of what was proper, the right way to act, his ambitions in life, his want to seek the right thing, all of those were strings that tied around him and constricted him from ever following his feelings. All of those strings snapped at once. Hairu could see it in Koori’s eyes, she always thought he had such human-looking eyes, that were like a flood gate holding back emotions.   
  
She never thought she would see all the life drain out of his eyes and become cold like hers.    
  
“I...had someone I loved. Warm and kind. I wanted her to be happier than anyone else. You can’t deny all that, I’ll never forgive you.”   
  


He reached with the arm that had been torn apart by her kagune and pried out one of the shards that were preventing movement. He seemed to have forgotten about the pain too and was bending that arm past its limits as he gripped the sword with two hands now too.    
  
“Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. LIes. Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. This world. You. Arima. The CCG. Lies. Lies. Lies. Nothing but lies. It’s a lie. There was someone.”

  
Ui’s long held back motions came out at once like a flood as he brought his sword into the air and pounded it onto her quinque split in two. Afterward he bashed, he bashed her hard on the head until even a ghoul like her felt her head get rattled and lost consciousness. Her body went limp and she fell backward.

  
Ui quickly tossed his sword aside and threw his arms out to catch her. As her consciousness faded away the last thing she saw was the tears running down both sides of his face, so much so they were dripping off his cheeks.

_ You’re so weird, Koori-senpai.  _

  
Was all she thought. 

_ It’s so weird how much you care.  _   
  
She had convinced herself that there was no one in this world who did. Perhaps, if she had asked Ui all the way back in their days at Zero Squad he would have praised her easily.   
  
If she asked him, he might have even said something as foolish as.   
_ It’s okay for you to keep living.  _   
He might have told her that lie because he was kind. 


	7. My Lost City

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusa plays with in the flowers with the other children.

Hahanki disease.  
A fictional disease in which the victim coughs up lower petals when they suffer from one-sided love. It ends when the beloved returns their feelings.  
From Hana meaning flower and hakimasu which means to throw up.  
It was popularized in a shoujo manga almost a decade ago, it was not some ancient cultural tradition Yusa just heard about it because Saiko described it to him once in a manga she was reading.

 

If Yusa had to describe his feeling of being constantly unable to talk about the garden though, he would imagine that he had bitten a flower’s head off and swallowed it whole, and now every time he wanted to speak he coughed up flower petals instead. Despite the flower petals smelling sweet, the candy-like taste was too sweet for him and it made him sick, like a pleasant smelling poison. 

There must have been flowers growing inside of his internal organs. The flower he swallowed had seeds in it without him realizing it, and they germinated in his stomach. The roots reached down into his intestines and twisted them up further stealing away nutrients. The stem grew around his spine, entwining around it like a vine. Every time he opened his mouth he let sunlight in for the parasitic garden inside of him. The more it grew the more energy it sucked away from him. When one of those dragon orphans finally got a lucky shot and sliced his corpse open, instead of blood flower petals would fall out of his veins.

 

As long as he held this secret back the infection would remain. There were even butterflies flying around in his internal little garden, he could not let them out and be free because he was keeping his lips closed and so their wings tickled the back of his throat instead. 

He wanted to swallow the weed killer to get rid of it. Flowers were pointless. A plant stored most of its energy its entire life, so it could bloom with one colorful flower to attract attention, solely for the purposes of reproduction and then it would die. There was no future for flowers at all. 

Either way, his lack of sleep for the past few days had left Yusa feeling sickly. It left him more dreamy than usual. Good thing he was in a hospital. All he needed to do was keep his head down and stare at the floor until the lines guided him to Hsiao’s room. 

Hairu had told him to keep the fact that she was alive a secret, and Urie had scolded him for running so far off of the planned course of their mission. Yusa made a quiet excuse that he was worried about Hsiao and Urie let him off with a warning. Not that Yusa thought Urie actually had the backbone to discipline anyone in his little family, not when he was too afraid to lose them. 

He wanted to visit Hsiao right away to tell her, but he hesitated as well. Before the words even left his mouth, they just became more flower petals. He already knew how she would respond. The same way that Hairu responded when he asked if Rikai and Shio were still alive.

 

He was better off not knowing.  
Things were fine as they were. They were lucky to have this. It was better to not shake the boat.  
His entire life he had been told that he should be grateful for what he had been given.  
Even though he was not given anything at all.  
He had to earn it by killing.

He had to prove a half-blood failure deserved to be kept alive. 

Standing at the foot of her bed, Yusa tugged at her arm softly. 

“Shio and Rikai might be alive. They might have been revived by Dragon.”

“...”

“Hsiao, if Dragon can do that to them, it might be able to cure you.”

“...”

“We shouldn’t stay here anymore. We should run away with them, maybe what happened to them can cure you too. I… I don’t want to stay at the chateau anymore if I have to keep killing.”

Ever since he was young he had stared at the outside world between the bars of a cage. Now there was an open door in front of him, but the person holding him back from running away was not the walls of the cage itself but the people around him. The people who said how good he had it now, who told him to cling to this momentary happiness. And not just them, but Yusa himself, timid, shy, afraid to lose anything else unless he kept fighting. 

Hsiao’s eyes had been distant and they finally settled on him. “Yusa, you have to stay at the chateau. Everyone is so kind to us.”

“Did you hear what I was saying?”

“Ah… I think my ears are going. When Big Sis Hairu was around this age too…”

 

Yusa’s eyes became unsteady his pupils shaking. There was a chance that Hsiao was telling the truth, but there was also a chance she was just ignoring him. Yusa was quiet by nature, but he also had a feeling that even if he threw his head back and screamed in that chateau nobody would hear him.

 

“Hairu…” Hairu had told him he could keep a secret because he was a garden child, Yusa wondered if that name would get Hsiao out of that bed. He tasted a combination of flowers and stomach acid at the back of his throat.

 

“Hairu is dead. Those people are still here, and they’re far kinder to us than we deserve. We have to work hard to pay them back.”

 

They didn’t deserve kindness?  
What had they done wrong?  
If it was a sin to be born, then they were already paying the price by dying slowly. Hsiao’s deteriorating bedridden condition and Yusa’s white hair was evidenced enough of that.  
They had already been punished enough, so everything after that was excessive.  
They could not spend their entire lives making up for that fact.  
They barely had any lives, to begin with.

 

“Don’t look so sad, you’re so quiet just like my mother. Smile more when you’re at the chateau, it’s a happy place. Everyone there is so free.”

 

Hsiao reached for his face. As she did, stroking his cheek with a faint pulse in her fingers Hsiao told Yusa about the past. 

Ching-Li Hisao, born to Taiwan and came to Japan as a child. The Washuu, they were not just all-powerful in Japan, ever since the second world war they had contacts in both Germany and China. Germany’s GFG even hosted Marude abroad for quite a while. They had power even overseas. 

They controlled all that was light and dark. Her mother was a poor Taiwanese woman who had been sold in human trafficking. She was told she was going to be offered to a rich businessman. The man in question, however, was the ghoul Yoshitoki Washuu. Each member of the head family was expected to create illegitimate offspring, in addition to the tangled network of arranged marriages that made up the vast majority of the gardens interconnected branch families. 

Yoshitoki took a liking to the woman. When she was pregnant with his child, the heads of the human trafficking syndicate tried to take her away so Yoshitoki had them slaughtered by V. For a moment it seemed like that woman would be free. She had been freed from a life of servitude by the man she loved, or so she thought. She was just escaping from one kind to the other, like stepping outside of a cage only to look up and see another slightly larger cage in the sky above you. 

Because she was saved by that man, she had to keep quiet even when she realized she was not the only one of the illegitimate children. She was raised in relative luxuries, like putting fine sheets, and pillows in the middle of a gilded cage Every day she held her daughter’s face and told her the story of how her father had saved her. That among the illegitimate children she was loved. 

 

Such things existed, the main family members sometimes picked favorites among their affairs and favorite illegitimate children. For a long time, Furuta was considered the favorite of the Furuta branch by his father Tsuneyoshi. 

 

Since they owed their lives to the Washuu both mother and daughter were more tightly controlled than others, Hsiao was an outsider among outsiders in the garden until a particularly bold girl named Hairu who had no sense of how to read the room began to boss her around. 

Yusa wondered if Hsiao realized what she was doing, cupping his face and telling him he was lucky to be saved by the chateau the same way her mother told her they were lucky to have been saved by being brought to the garden. 

Ignoring that she was not saved but rather “acquired” that the mother and child were only taken care of because that child was his child that he had planned to use. 

If she was he could not blame her, at the same time though that did not mean he agreed with her. He had his own story to tell her too. Even he had parents once. As much as he wished to be a plant because continuing to live as something that was not quite human was painful. A mother and a father. His mother was a half human that was no good for combat, occasionally those were born though most of them died out by the time they reached age. 

The Washuu had to find a use for her, so they matched her up in an arranged marriage. His mother was only fifteen at the time, but she looked older due to the accelerated aging. The man marrying her was a wealthy businessman, a newcomer who wanted to marry into a branch family of the Washuu believing tying himself to an old family would increase his political power. In reality, the Washuu was most likely using him as proof of their own legitimacy. Even Yoshitoki and Tsuneyoshi, as well as Matsuri, had been married off to human women at one point from influential families to pose as wives and increase their political ties. 

His father was thoughtful but quiet. He only had a mind for business. He was rather machinelike. He had no idea how to talk to his own son, so he brought him presents, books from all around the world. Yusa filled in the gaps in his information on the outside world, by reading about them. Soon everything he knew about the world was informed for him by the books he read. The fantasies where heroes fought dragons were just as real to him as the biology books he read about butterflies. 

The Washuu did not even need to let the husband know of their end of the arrangement, they kept it secret that they were ghouls and they were only using him to legitimize in the eyes of the public that they were humans. It was an easy secret to keep because while his mother was housed on the compound, his father often went on business trips for long stretches at a time and only came back home a few times a year.

 

Even though he did not know much about the lives of his mother or himself, Yusa loved his father. He was always a kind man, even if he was so reserved in his emotion that he could not show it in the way normal people could. 

Then one day by mistake, either by someone at V slipping him the information or just pure bad luck his father found out about the true nature of his wife. That she was a half ghoul, and therefore his blood son was a quarter ghoul. He was so disgusted that when Yusa came home to greet his father that day he found a trail of blood to the bedroom where his mother was allowed to sleep on the main compound. When he cracked the door open, his father was stabbing his mother’s corpse again and again, the white flowers on the floor ran red with her blood. Even after she was dead, he kept stabbing. Then, seeing Yusa in the hallway he rushed after him planning to kill both his son and himself. 

Yusa was only saved by a patrolling V member. One of the guards that were always watching the Washuu family grounds. Just as his father stood over him, his back was sliced in half by a shadow and he collapsed. The body fell on top of Yusa but he did not scream, he could not make any noise at all, he was being suffocated by it. 

At the time as he saw the V member walk away, on their sickly rotting faces they gave him a knowing smile as if they had expected this to happen all along. Of course they did, being born a half human was practically a death sentence, and those members of V whose bodies were too sickly to make it into the CCG were only able to still move around because puppet strings were tied to each of their limbs forcing them to long after death, even if they wanted to die they had no choice anymore because their lives had belonged to the Washuu since birth. 

That was why Yusa felt no gratitude at all for what the Washuu gave him, because he had known right from the start he had been a sin since birth. It was their fault that he was born, so he had to take no responsibility for that fact. 

There was one last memory after his father’s corpse was transferred overseas and made to look like a suicide after a bad business deal, and his mother was buried. A V agent held him by the hand and walked him to meet with the man who would be supervising his training from now on.

 

His hair was like snow and he had a gaze of ice. He did not seem to be looking at Yusa, even when their eyes met it was like he could not even see him there he was somewhere far off into the distance.

 

“He’s a distant member of the Arima branch, so he might show the same promise as you Kishou.”

 

Kaiko said as he handed him off. Even when they were next to each other, it was like no one was there at all, that ephemeral presence would never leave his mind. Even after he was long dead he would haunt him like a ghost. That was the first time Yusa had met his god.

“Hsiao, listen. I feel like if you don’t run away from this hospital room now you’ll never escape it.”

“I’m returning to active duty in a month. You worry so much Yusa, you should be a little tougher you’re a man now aren’t you? Just wait a little bit and everything will be fine.” 

“I…”

I have been waiting, he wanted to say.  
He waited for his father to come home. His father promised one day he would take him on one of his business trips and apologized for leaving him alone so often.  
He just wanted to go to the outside world with his father once.  
The next time he came home he saw his mother’s blood staining all those flowers.  
That was why the flowers grown in this garden were so rotten. Rather than water the ground was drenched in blood and fertilized with the bones of the children who lived here.  
His father was so kind and he did that.  
Even soft, kind and quiet people are capable of terrible things.  
Not because they are human or ghouls but because they are people.

Hsiao.  
Your kindness is hurting me.  
It’s hurting me because I care about you, and you won’t care about yourself. 

He wanted to say that but all those words got stuck in his throat. He was choking on flower petals. He was going to suffocate on them soon.

 

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.” 

He swallowed them down again and bowed his head to Hsiao for his rudeness before leaving the room alone. The second he did he started to sprint out of the hospital. He could not take that atmosphere anymore, he needed to escape to somewhere with breathable air. 

If he was going to feel this awful what was the point of having a body to begin with? He wished the moths would do their work and eat his internal organs already. He did not need anything inside of him if it was just going to cause him to ain with no relief. 

💀

 

“What’s wrong Yusa Yusa Hakusho?”

“Nothing.”

“Really because you’re making a face.”

“This is the same face I always make.”

“No way your usual face is much cuter.” Hajime smiled that indestructible smile at him. It only made Yusa want to punch his teeth out. The fact that Hajime seemed to be the only one that could read his mood just worsened that same mood.

The last time they met up they made arrangements to meet again. This time they were not in public but at a river bend in the ccg academy. Apparently, the place was nostalgic for Hajime so he knew how to sneak in and out of it memorizing the layout like the back of his hand. 

The place reminded Yusa of the sunlit garden academy, the section where they were educated. Morbidly, he wondered if breeding their own garden was not enough for the Washuu so they had to take in orphans too to fill out their ranks. Not only did they plant their own flowers they stole flowers from other people’s gardens as well. 

“Why are you so obsessed with Shio and Rikai in particular?” Hajime asked him, but Yusa doubted he was concerned about his feelings he probably just wanted to use the information to mock him more. “They weren’t the only members of zero squad. There were two that were killed by Aura and Tanakamaru the first day you turned traitor weren’t there? And weren’t there plenty of people you knew in the garden that died?”

“Yeah, but…”

“They were your friends? Family? They were special to you?” 

Yusa wondered if Hajime even needed him here. He seemed plenty capable of carrying out the conversation by himself. If Yusa held a mirror up perhaps Hajime would be tricked and he could save himself a headache. “I don’t know what a special person is, sorry…”

“Even if you have no memories of being loved, for as long as you have memories of loving someone, you can still live.”

 

“What?” 

“Come on, I just said something really deep.” 

“You think a lot of the things you say are deep.”

“What I mean is, even if no one ever loved you you can still love someone else. Come on, come on, didn’t you love one of them? Which one was it? Shio? Tell me it was Shio, or maybe Rikai I guess.” 

“If they are dead it doesn’t matter.” 

“Hey, mr. I don’t have feelings don’t give me that crap. It’s not like you stop loving someone because they’re dead. I never stopped loving my parents even after they died.”

 

Unrequited love.  
With a dead person, unrequited love is the only option. It goes on forever, without end, no matter how many loves you might know after. You missed out on the heartbreak.  
Unlike requited love, an unrequited love could go on forever.  
It would probably even outlive Yusa himself, whose expiration date was not going to be long after his last hair turned white. When Rikai died so suddenly she took his love with her. 

 

“Yeah…”

He finally admitted. 

“I wanted to show them the outside world.”

 

Hajime immediately pointed at his smiling face, and his eerily white perfect smile. “Would you make that same promise to me? Hey, hey, what if I asked you to run away with me right now Yusa-cchi?”

“No thank you.” 

Yusa really did not understand the form Hajime’s teasing was currently taking. Even someone as weird with no personal boundaries as Hajime, who liked to violate those kinds of things for fun and a cheap laugh was being oddly personal. 

“Just tell me if they’re alive...” Yusa said, losing patience. He was glad he could lose patience around Hajime at least. Everybody else he had to keep biting his tongue. 

“Sure, I’ll do it for a favor. You know, I’ll serve you in this life and you serve me in the next one.”

“Who said we had a next life?”

“Huh?”

“We’re barely alive in this one.”

“You’re a big buzzkill you know that.” 

“I was only taught to kill, sorry.”

 

Since Yusa said everything in the same tone of voice, it was difficult for Hajime to tell whether or not Yusa was being sarcastic, which was exactly what Yusa wanted. 

Hajime raised a hand, curling his fingers against his chest in a gesture of honesty that looked entirely dishonest when Hajime did it, “I only want a favor from you.”

“Hmm?”

“Well I can’t just tell you what it is, then where would the fun be? Life’s no fun without a little risk you know. I’m just thinking about what would be fun for you, here, since you always look like you’re having no fun at all.” 

“I don’t care about fun.”

 

Yusa saw squiggly lines appear in his vision as his frustration with Hajime’s games mounted. Especially since he knew Hajime himself was probably not the source of this twisted personality of his, he was just imitating Nimura Furuta, that bad garden child that had been a thorn in all their sides. 

Suddenly, Hajime stopped and Yusa bumped into him. He saw Hajime frown for the first time, and looked over his shoulder. 

There was a dead dog lying in the river.  
It seemed like the river was cluttered with spam.  
A cord that resembled a yellow spaghetti was popping out from its cross-section.  
Yusa watched as its internal organs bloomed in such a grotesque manner.  
Yusa knew beauty didn’t exist after all.  
There is no way a soul would dwell in such a hideous thing.

 

Hajime walked to the gross looking body without hesitation that even made Yusa who was far too conditioned to death that he no longer even smelled rotting things because the scent of flowers covered it up for him, or saw bodies because he pictured a field of flowers instead, hesitate to touch something so grotesque. 

Hajime grabbed one end and lifted it up. “That damn Tokage, he must have killed this before he died. I thought he stuck to cats the bastard.” He gestured at Yusa with his eyes. “Come, on pick up the other end.”

 

Yusa did what he was told, not because he pitied the dog but because he was too quiet to disagree. He tried to pick up the other end and only fumbled a little bit when the orans spilled out. The two boys walked together farther away from the shore until they found a clear spot in the forest.

 

 

Hajime started to dig at the ground with his hands. When his fingers got cold, an idea bulb went off in his head and suddenly he started to tunnel with three of Rize’s kagune that grew from his back.

 

He did not use them to pick up the disgusting dog corpse though, Hajime did it with his own hands and then pushed the dirt back over after it was laid down in the hole. “Seriously, what does that guy think he’s doing killing things like that.”

“But you loved killing things Hazuki. You were always bragging about how you wanted to get out there and be stronger than the ghouls.”

“I only like killing things that are stronger than me. Only a monster enjoys killing weaklings.” 

“Those ghouls you were trying to kill were weak.”

“No, they were ghouls and I was just a little kid. Even adult humans were stronger than me. Ever since my parents were torn apart, I was afraid, every ghoul in the world was stronger than me and they weren’t just done with my parents they were going to come for me too. I couldn’t live normally after that, I was terrified.”

 

“You said you wanted to fight.”

“I thought if I fought and proved myself I was stronger than anybody else in the world, then I could stop fighting. If there was nothing that could touch me, I’d never feel the pain of losing my parents again, and my life would go back to normal like it was supposed to be. I could even run back to the playground and play with the other kids.”

 

He got strong and threw away his humanity because he wanted to go back to being a normal kid again. That was an inherent contradiction. 

 

Contradictions.  
Flowers and corpses.  
A sunlit garden locked away in the 24th ward with no light.  
His life was filled with those things, polar opposites that made no sense forced together.  
Like a ghoul and human failure.  
Like finding beauty in death. 

“Fine, I’ll do your favor whatever it is.”

 

He was sick of it. He was sick of both the rotting and the flowers. He just wanted to get this sickness out of his throat and let these butterflies free from his body.  
If he had to lie to the whole world then he should be honest with himself at least.  
He wanted to see them again.  
He wanted to see Shio and Rikai.  
He wanted to keep his promise to go to the outside world with Rikai.

 

Hajime only laughed at getting his way.  
“I knew you’d cave. That’s why we’ve been walking on the pathway to see them the entire time.”

 

Yusa could not hear anything else.  
He even tuned out the sound of Hajime’s laughter.

 

💀

 

When Hajime brought him to a forest clearing deep in the woods Yusa was not suspicious. After all, as long as light broke through the canopy layer of the forest, patches of flowers could grow even in the middle of the woods like this.

 

He did not see Shio and Rikai. Suddenly though, the world upturned itself and his vision inverted. Something had wrapped around his leg and lifted him up. At first, Yusa thought it was Hajime who had decided to kill him after all.

Yusa wondered why this time he had come unarmed. He made such a point of brining his quinque with him last time. Perhaps he had been talking so much with Hajime lately he was infected with the other boy’s foolishness. 

As he hung there by his ankle, he was greeted by an upside down Rikai. The kagune extended from her tailbone all the way up into the air where he dangled from it, it must have been a bikaku. She suddenly let go and caught him in her arms. He was being held like a princess. Funny, he thought he had come here to rescue her. 

Rikai said in a tender voice was entirely unlike her. “Yusa… your hair, it’s gone white.” 

She reached forward and brushed his bangs out of his face. He had grown his bangs long just for the purpose of letting them fall in front of his eyes, so he would not have to make eye contact in conversation with others. It made hiding his secret much easier now that he could no longer hide behind Take’s leg. 

“Your hair used to be so fluffy, like a little black sheep.” 

“It looked childish…” Yusa complained. 

“Well, you were a child.” Rikai’s voice was so soft, and yet that softness seemed to cut away at Yusa, less like a sheep’s wool and more like razor blades shedding off some part of him. As he felt such a heavy sadness in her soft words. “Yusa, happy birthday.”

“Ah… I forgot.”

He had not even remembered that it was his birthday a few days ago. He did not consider it a day worth celebrating, it was just another reminder of his early end slowly encroaching upon him year by year. It was more like an expiration date than a birthday.

 

“Are you stupid or something?” 

“I guess…” That was more like Rikai. He was happy.

“You should value your birthday a little more. We were happy you were born.”

 

Rikai’s hair was long and purple. She had grown it out, but it was straight as ever. In comparison, behind her Shio’s hair was fluffy and curly, as if his curls had gone wild and taken over his entire head.

 

Then suddenly, Rikai dropped him on the ground. She lifted her leg and pushed her boot hard into his chest. He heard a creak of his ribs and hoped nothing would break from that kick. He was not like a ghoul, his body would not heal, it would only get more and more broken as time went on.

 

“You shouldn’t have come. We’re not human anymore. We’re as good as dead.”

 

Yusa was sick of it. He was tired of this ‘don’t help me’ and ‘it can’t be helped’ crap. Forget the Washuu it might as well have been the national motto. He was sick of trying to swallow it and force it down his throat. 

Everybody around him was in so much pain but they did not want to do anything about it. They only wanted to anesthetize their pain, they just wanted to stop feeling and numb themselves down. Yusa felt the moth's wings again, they were no longer fluttering they were going to claw his way out of his stomach and burst forth from this point.

The people he thought were dead. The people whose deaths made him lose all hope of seeing the outside world. They were in front of him again. He should be happy, they should be reuniting with hugging and tears like they did in the movies, but instead, he was being told even if they were alive it was best if he never saw them again.

For the best.  
He should be grateful.  
He had it good.  
He was lucky to have what he had. 

“Everybody thinks their right.” 

Yusa said grinding his teeth. Suddenly he grabbed the foot that was pushing him down into the ground and then used his strength to push her off balance. Even if this body of his was useless and prone to dying he should have at least had the strength of an almost ghoul. The moment Rikai started to fall back he sprung to his feet following up in an instant to tackle her.

 

“What are you all sick? You’re all sick, you’re all slowly dying! You can’t be helped! Living is such a pain that it’s just too much it’s making you sick! There’s no one that can save you from it! All you can do is get sicker and sicker? Is that it, huh?”

 

Yusa was shouting in her face. He did not even realize he had raised his voice. Did his body do that? Were those his real feelings spilling out of his lips. 

“Well, if everybody’s sick, if society is a sickness, then do you know who the most sick of it is? Me! You’re just acting like Hsiao and saying there’s nothing that can be done to save you! I’m so sick of hearing that! Don’t tell others they can’t save you when you’re not even bothering to save yourself.”

 

His throat was getting scratchy. He hesitated for a moment and let is jaw hang open. It was not a moth, but rather a spider that crawled up his throat. It left his mouth and then crawled down his arm and left him finally. 

That was right, butterflies caught in spider webs. That was what V was. They trapped life, and made you unable to flap your wings. He coughed a few more times and the webs cleared from his throats. Only then could the butterflies finally escape from his lips. The words flew away with them. 

“I’m so happy just to see you again, can’t you get that through your thick skull? Are you going deaf? I thought the poison from dragon was supposed to cure you. There’s no excusing you now! If you’re stupid, then even stupidity is supposed to be cured by death and you guys died once. Even Shio should be less of a moron now!”

 

Slowly but surely, the poison he had forced himself to swallow for so long was being vomited back up and cleared from his body. It was because they were here he could do that.

 

 

Shio suddenly took offense to not only the insult but Rikai being pushed over. “Rikai’s trying to be considerate! We didn’t want you to end up like us! We were happy as long as you were living happily on your own, we didn't want to be selfish and drag you into our mess.” 

Shio suddenly tackled Yusa over and the two of them tumbled off of Rikai. Shio was much stronger than Yusa, he always had been the one with the most kills among them. Yusa felt like he was disappointing the name Arima because he was not the standout talent of the squad. 

Shio did not hold back at all. It was just not in his nature. He punched Yusa in the face, and then pushed his head into the dirt. Yusa barely noticed, the pain was much better than the numb feeling that had been infecting him. “Did you ever think about what I wanted? What if I wanted to be dragged into your mess? It’s okay to be selfish… It’s okay to drag each other down because we’re… we’re…” 

“We weren’t anything.” Rikai said, standing up from the ground and then grabbing Shio by the shoulder and pushing him off. “We just killed people together. Our only connection is that we grew up in the same fucked up place, if that’s friends or family, that’s a pretty twisted family we have there.”

Perhaps Rikai did not want to validate the Washuu’s view of family, by calling the three of them a family because they were all children who had fallen off of the branches. Who knew if they would even get along if they were not forced to survive together.

“Hey, why are you leaving me out!” 

Hajime said, as he suddenly jumped on the pile of all of them. Yusa had thought they were fighting, but from the way, Hajime was laughing as he started to roll around with Shio it looked like something else entirely. His face was sore already and he brushed his hair in front of his eyes in case one of them started to bruise. 

A moment ago he had been willing to break Rikai or Shio’s legs in order to drag them back to the Chateau with him, or somewhere else, anywhere as long as it was not here. The rush from that moment had faded but as he looked at them he realized he had felt more with the three present than he had at all in the past six years. There was no way he could go back knowing they were alive that was for certain. 

“Maybe we weren’t friends or a family, but… that time when we were together. That was the only time I ever felt happy.” 

Yusa’s honest feelings, made Rikai blush and look away. 

Yusa looked around at the flowers that they had torn up while pushing each other over. “I thought we were fighting, but were we just playing?”

Even Shio and Hajime had calmed down and looked back up at him. Yusa looked up at the sky above him. The sky that stretched on endlessly, that connected all of them, because they all looked up at the same sky. 

The sky was a beautiful clear blue, the kind that appeared right next to tragedy.  
“Why didn’t we get ever get the chance to play like this when we were children?”  
But Yusa saw nothing at all in that sky.


	8. Save me the Waltz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ui goes drinking with Take

Hairu Ihei heard the voices of children playing in the distance. 

  
They played amongst the orchids, laughing in a carefree manner. Many faceless children who would soon be forgotten. There was one who stood taller than the others. His eyes were completely grey, a colorless existence lacking any kind of emotion at all to color them in and yet they were so kind looking. His hand was large and powerful, and yet such a hand reached out to her and laid itself on the top of her head. 

 

Hairu had only been struck to be disciplined before, and if she did not provoke them to discipline her nobody touched her at all. Until that moment she did not realize that humans could touch each other in such a soft way. Before this, she had always wondered why the caretakers of this place raised so many identical flowers together.   
  
When she saw an entire field of white orchids it looked pointless to her. They were all faceless flowers, if they were trampled on they could be easily replaced. Raising so many at once meant it was impossible for an individual flower to be beautiful. An individual flower would never feel cared for or loved. 

  
However, if one flower were planted all alone in a barren field wouldn’t it be lonely? Flowers were meant to grow close to one another, to have the wind blow them and their petals and leaves brush off one another.    
  
Even though Arima’s hands were those of a killer, somehow they were just as soft as a flower petal kissing her face. That day she decided even if they were short-lived, there must have been a chance even for them to grow together, to lay their roots down and connect. They were all standing on the same soil, after all, they were all receiving the same sunlight underneath the same sky.    
  
She wanted to live for the sake of that connection. 

 

_ I have to hurry. _ _  
  
_

So she could be praised by Arima.   
  
_ Because we don’t live long. _   
  


Whatever reason they had been created for, why they had such a fate imposed on them, none of it mattered. As long as she could get that hand to gently stroke her head again, just like when she was little.

 

People were born to be able to connect to one another. Hairu giggled. She had a connection to Arima because they were from the same place. They shared this memory, and she couldn’t help but feel giddy about it. 

Whether human or ghoul, there was a rule that forced them to never talk about this secret, of this moral contradiction and the place where they had been brought up - the Sunlit Garden.    
  
But that was where she had met him.   
They had memories of this place together. 

Even incomplete as they were, they were able to share things.    
  
She was happy, she was happy, she was happy, living solely for that reason.    
A teenage boy and a girl, standing together in a garden.    
As long as she had that image in her heart she could stay strong.    
She could smile even tasting blood as it ran down from her lips and dribbled off her chin.    
  


She knew Arima cared about her. She knew because they had shared that memory together, deep in her heart. They were connected because they came from the same place, that was why she could be happy even being born with so little because it meant she had been born in the same place as him to meet him. 

  
If he could just acknowledge her again. If he could smile at her when she did good things, and scold her when she did bad things, and connect to her through that touch on the head when she did something extra good.    
  
Yes, if she could have a life like that, it would have made every misfortune in life worth suffering. Even being born half alive, she would have found a full life to live. 

  
Arima’s back appeared to her once more and Hairu tried to call out to him, but no words came out of her mouth. The more her lips moved the more nothing came out. She finally realized why, because there was no throat beneath her head and no vocal cords. All she could do was open and close her mouth, forever unheard.    
  
The image of Arima walked farther and farther away from her. She wondered why, why, why, again and again, why did he not revive with her. Then suddenly the idea occurred to her. Perhaps Arima just did not want to.    
  
Arima was enough. He was enough for her to make even a half-life worth living. The same could not be said the other way around, no matter how hard Hairu tried she could never be enough for him. She was not a good enough reason for him to keep living.   
  
She was not enough. Once she realized the simple truth of the matter, she accepted it easily. Perhaps she had known it all along and had been denying it. With that thought overpowering her mind, Ihei Hairu woke up peacefully. Of course, she was at peace, she had surrendered everything to that thought. There was nothing more peaceful than… a feeling of nothingness. An unfamiliar grey ceiling, unfamiliar memories to how she had gotten there but what did she care. She who had once tried so hard to live and make something of her small life realized there was no difference between living or dying at all. Losing her one point of attachment she was free floating, like a head in a fishbowl, tumbling around and around in the water, and even that nauseating feeling did not affect her because she was completely unaware she was drowning.    
  
Then suddenly, a familiar face took up her world view.    
“Koori-senpai…” She mumbled.    
  


Her black coat was removed, and she was dressed down to white pajamas. Before she knew it there was something warm in her lap. She looked down and saw a cup of coffee had been handed to her in bed. . Her hands grew unsteady for a moment, but Koori’s hands laid over hers and steadied them.    
  
He picked the cup up and pressed it against her lips guiding her to drink it slowly. Hairu regained herself as she remembered their fight and how she had tried everything to push Koori away from her. She looked up and saw he had removed his coat and vest and was dressed in a white button-up shirt, his shoulder, and arm tied up in bandages. Despite how much it must have hurt he did not let any of the pain show on his face.    
  
He was pitying her. That must have been it. Koori only ever did what was proper. In the CCG, he was always lecturing her on what she was supposed to do. He took care of her because he was her partner and her superior to make her into a model CCG agent. Even after work, he spent time with her walking her home to a barren apartment where he lived all alone.    
  
Koori was chivalrous, he cared about justice more than anything else, like an old fashioned knight from a storybook. She thought even now he was probably only doing this because he thought it was the right thing to do. But, at the moment she could not help herself. She sipped the black ichor of coffee because without any warmth at all she would go back to being a corpse. 

 

When she finished she looked at him with dull eyes. “You should eat too, Koori-senpai.”    
  
“But I…”   
  
He did not want to eat in front of her the human food she could no longer eat. Koori must be working alongside ghouls these days because the TSC now was run between an alliance of wealthy ghouls and the humans of the former CCG. Perhaps he could forgive her for being a ghoul, but she could not forgive herself. 

 

His kindness was wasted on her. Someone who just wanted to forget and be empty. She wanted to shut out everything, including the dream she had had while unconscious on the way to this place but…    
  
Suddenly she tilted her head to the side. “Oh, where is this?” 

She finally remembered to ask.    
  
Koori narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you serious, you wake up in a strange man’s house and you don’t ask where you are until just now?” 

  
“I didn’t know you were a strange man, Koori-senpai.”    
  
“No, I’m not..”   
  
“You brought me here because you were planning on kidnapping me?”   
  
“N-no, I would never! It’s not like I could just leave you in that terrible place!”

  
Was the garden terrible?   
She had no idea, no frame of reference anymore. In the garden she was made to kill ghouls, in the CCG she killed ghouls, there was no difference to her and no escape. Perhaps everything was terrible.    
  
“Well then, there’s no reason for me to worry is there?” She said, smiling like she used to, an empty and airheaded smile.    
  
“You should worry a little more about yourself. I know you have no common sense, but you can have a sense of self-preservation at least.”   
  
“What good is a sense of self-preservation if I’m already dead?” Hairu asked. She only realized how insensitive the question was when Ui’s hands began to shake as he took the cup away from her. It was a little worrying, saying something that had upset him that much without even realizing it. No, wait, why wasn’t she that upset by what she said? 

 

Ui stayed silent as he led her to a table. He held her hand the whole way and pulled a chair out for her. The way he held her it was like some fragile thing, and he looked scared to look away from her. If he looked away for one second, the clock would strike midnight, the magic would end, a wind would blow away the last cherry blossom clinging to the tree leaving nothing but a dead tree behind. 

  
He poured her another coffee and made his own breakfast. She watched cupping her rose-red cheeks in her hands. “I’m surprised you can do that.” 

  
“I’m not just some spoiled brat you know, I’m a hard working spoiled brat. I’m all grown up now I can make my own breakfast and everything.”   
  


 

  
Growing up. Hairu had gotten taller, and curvier but she wondered if she had grown up. In her heart all she had ever wanted to do was return to the days Arima would pat her on the head. She still felt like that girl lost all alone amongst the flowers in the garden. 

 

“I don’t need to be here…” Hairu said, what she had been repeating in her mind again and again.    
  
Frantically, as if he were afraid she would disappear Ui put a hand over hers. “Wait, isn’t it better to eat together in the morning?”    
  
There was a time she ate in a mess hall in that school. After she was promoted and allowed to graduate to the CCG rather than being enlisted in V, for food she was given a stipend of money. When she ate, it was using the yen coins and cash that were left on her countertop, and it was completely alone on a bench before work.    
  
A few times she even asked Arima to have a meal with her, but he always made a polite excuse to turn her down. She knew Arima went drinking with his other coworkers from time to time, she wondered if she climbed high enough in the ranks would she be able to. She would do anything to stop being that girl eating bread before work, all along, feeling the cold air even though she was wearing her jacket. 

  
The world was too cold a place, too cold for a single pink flower to survive all on her own. At that moment she realized, Hairu had no memory at all of sharing a meal with another person like this.    
  
Tears formed at the corners of her eyes. Why… was she crying? She had nothing to be sad about. There was nothing to be sad about losing a life which she had never lived in the first place.    
  
Ui immediately jumped up from his plate and started to fuss over her again. He really was treating her like some princess, the kind that if you took your eyes off of her would prick her finger and fall asleep, or bite into a poisoned apple. She wondered why that was again, oh right.    
  
It was strange, somebody else making a bigger deal of her death than she did. He rushed away from the table and returned slamming a book open on the table in front of her. Filled with it were many photographs that were decorated with paper cutouts and shiny stickers. 

 

She recognized herself in one of the photographs. She smiled a completely empty smile without a care in the world. “I remember the day we took that. That was the day you made me ride the trains home with you because you were afraid I would get lost…” Hairu had bothered Ui for the photograph. He was reluctant the entire time and claimed they were getting too personal for a workplace, but the moment she leaned against him as the camera went off, he smiled. 

He carefully guided her through the pages of the scrapbook. Page by page, she saw Ui’s life unfold in front of her. What puzzled her the most making her eyes glow again like a child once more is that she did not recognize so many of the pictures that Ui had taken. She had never seen these things before.   
  
Her curiosity overtook her and one by one she began to point at them and ask. “What’s this? What’s this?” The childish question repeated so many times she sounded like she might break into song.    
  
Most people believed innocence to be a good thing. They wanted to protect their purity, but to Hairu innocence was quite insidious. It was because she had known nothing at all about ghouls, nothing at all about the life outside of her that she had been able to kill them so easily. That was why she accepted what little of a life she had. Pure, was just another synonym for empty.    
  
“What’s this?”    
  
“That’s the stables my family owns where I ride my horses.”    
  
“I didn’t think a person could ride horses outside of a storybook. What’s this?”   
  
“That’s my college.”   
  
“What was that like?”   
  
“You went to school too.”    
  
“They didn’t teach us anything about the real world you already knew that.” 

  
Ui had lectured her for it so many times, and he felt a pang of guilt stab him. “It was awkward and I had no idea what I was doing and where I wanted to go in life.”   
  
“What a wonderful thing. To have no idea what you want to do with your life at all.” Hairu said, as someone who was born for a reason and had worked towards that purpose her entire life, it suddenly seemed kinder if the world had been meaningless after all. Then she could have become anything, rather than being a killer. “What’s this?”    
  
“A dance I went to once.”   
  
“They still hold balls?”   
  
“Well, it’s like the CCG award ceremonies, you go there to socialize.”   
  
“How many ghouls do you have to kill to get an invitation?”   
  
“None…?”

  
Well, she did not even know how to dance anyway so going to such a pretty event would have been a waste on her. Only good, kind girls who had been mistreated by horrible stepmothers got to go to balls, Hairu was none of those things she was just a killer. 

  
She did not know about libraries, businesses, and so many other things about normal life simply because nobody had ever told her. Eventually though the pages she was turning came to an end. She remembered the last memory he had taken down, it was the Christmas they spent together. At the time he bought her a hairpin and made her a promise that they would come together with Arima and the rest next year. After that, they became wrapped up in the Rose investigation and they were so swamped with work they barely spent time with each other or talked about anything other than ghouls when they were together.    
  
“I’m sorry… I never got to celebrate Christmas with you and Arima again.”   
  
Ui apologized.    
His eyes were brimming with tears again. She had no idea how he could have such full eyes, he lived such a full life, full of color. He was not a field of white orchids, a field of flowers soon to die, if he were flowers he would be the kind that tunneled underground for the snow and then always poked up after the frost ended and lived to the next year.    
  
She had no idea why he was apologizing to her either. Ui had never done anything wrong, he had tried his best to raise her as a pupil, she was the one who did something wrong, she was the empty one. She was the one who did not know how to be human. He was doing his best to educate a stupid, empty girl like himself. “It’s okay, Koori-senpai. Even if I had lived until next year, I don’t think Arima would have gone with us if I was the one who asked him.”    
  
She did not want to look at those pages anymore, so suddenly she jerked the page away and turned through more and more pages. At random she put her finger on one of the photos, of Ui sitting alone in a booth. Odds were she would not know what that was either.    
  
“What were you doing here?”   
  
“Karaoke… Umm… all of my friends are there they’re just out of the room getting drinks. All of them. At the same time.”   
  
“Wow, Koori-senpai you have so many friends too.”    
  
Hairu instantly believed it in a way that made Ui feel bad about lying to her. 

 

“Hairu, you don’t have to keep staring at photographs. If you want to do those things, then just do them.”    
  
“But I don’t know anything… I don’t know how…” She did not even know how to live. She had not been born to live, she had been born to kill ghouls for the CCG.    
  
“Then I’ll teach you.” He said taking his hand in hers and dragging her forehead. Until he realized she was still in her pajamas and immediately his face reddened as he left the room so she could get changed. 

  
  


💀

It was the strangest thing. Ui led her to a place with a neon sign in the middle of town. There were drinks available but she had never drunk before in her life. It would have always gotten in the way of work before. She was dragged into a room with uncomfortable seats by Ui, and suddenly she could swear even though the room was supposed to be soundproof she could hear the noises everybody else made in the establishment.    
  
People, people just going about living their lives and laughing without a care in the world. What had they done to earn such a thing, or perhaps for humans it was different. Humans were born able to laugh and smile without even having to think about it, they did not need a reason to smile because they were born for no reason at all.    
  
They were seeds carelessly tossed on the wind and raised without meaning or purpose unlike her who had been so carefully raised in the right conditions who had worked so hard to make some small meaning of her life.    
  
There were many annoying things. She was nervous about singing. Ui kept hogging the microphone from her and picking the songs because she had no idea what any of the songs even were. Yet, at the same time, she realized a smile had spread on her lips.    
  
She thought she might never smile again because the only reason she had been able to stay strong and still smile for so long, smile even on the point of death was that she had that memory of Arima with her. That memory gave her purpose. 

A carefree smile, a meaningless smile, was she able to smile in such a way. She reached forward and touched her lips not understanding the expression she was making on her face. Ui hesitated too, she instantly felt that she must have been doing something weird.    
  
“Are you having fun?” He asked.    
  
“Nnnnnnoooo….” She lied.    
  
“Sorry, I guess this is kind of a lame hobby. If I’d lived a better life, I’d have more to show you.”    
  
She thought he had lived a wonderful life. Yet at that moment Ui’s shoulders were heavy with a regret she did not understand. Ui grabbed the console from her and picked a song again. This time it was Hibi no Awa from the band Ostereich. She had no idea who they were but the name sounded oddly familiar.    
  
Suddenly his hand appeared in her view, taking up the entirety of the world she saw. Her eyes closed for a moment, and by instinct alone, she wanted to be patted on the head. Of course, she was just being a foolish little girl, she had done nothing at all in her life worthy of praise, wasting the life she was so determined not to waste.    
  
Even so, he held out that hand for her. She wondered if there had been anybody who had given her a hand like this… if there had if somebody had reached for her… would things have ended the same way? 

  
No, they probably would have, she thought to hang her head. Even if a hand had appeared in front of her she would not see it, because all she cared about all that time had been Arima. Still, his hand did not go away.   
  
Hairu took it because she could see no other way forward. Suddenly he pulled too hard and she fell against his chest.    
  
“What are you doing, Koori-senpai?”   
  
“I’m umm… I just wanted to teach you to dance. You’ve never done it before right”

  
“B-but I… I don’t know anything…”    
  
“That’s how everybody is, but even if you don’t know anything you can still learn.”    
  
He grabbed her hand and lined it upon him, and took her other hand entwining their fingers together. He let Hairu lean on him and took the first steps, leading them together in the dance. They were in a cramped space, with drink trays and an ashtray that could be easily knocked over. The worst possible time and place for a dance.    
  


_ Around the time the town's light(ing) had loosened and gone out,  _

_ I saw people with no faces  _

_ They died as they were engulfed by evening waves _

_ Everybody, everything is a corpse _

  
  


Her feet were clumsy on the floor. It was so wrong and so backward for her when she killed she moved gracefully without any hesitation at all like she was dancing, but when she danced she stumbled, hesitated and acted clumsily like most people did when killing.    
  
It was wrong, it was wrong for him to hold her like this. He was just dancing with a corpse. All she could do was cling to him and be puppeteered around. He spun her away and then she tripped over her known feet and knocked him over. Koori fell back two paces. She tried to leave just then, turning around to walk away.    
  
Perhaps Koori felt guilt over her death which was why he did this. She should correct him before she left for good, that her death was no one’s fault but her own, she was born to die right from the beginning. A foolish girl, whose idiocy could only be cured by death. Suddenly though he grabbed her birth both hands and pulled her back into the dance.    
  


Maybe they were sacrificed for that conclusion by someone

I'm not content that I know

It seemed like time will stop

We haven't already lost each other, right? It seems like this is a movie

 

A movie that was right, the children of the garden were only allowed to experience happy endings in Disney movies. When he was younger Furuta had a particular obsession with them. It was the only thing Hairu could stand to do with him. She liked the scene where the prince and princess danced for the first time like they already knew each other in a past life.    
  
That was right when she first saw Arima she thought he looked just like a prince. He suddenly appeared in that flower field in front of her… was she thinking, that she wanted to be saved? Perhaps there was one point in which she thought she could be saved, that Arima would save her, but what use was remembering that now she had forgotten a long time ago.    
  
Hairu and Koori circled each other and then bumped one of the couches, Ui who was usually a perfectionist kept on dancing like he did not even notice. He looked at Hairu as if she was the only thing in the world. Hairu seeing those heavy feelings of his only felt weaker and weaker if she was the only thing in the world, that would be a tiny and insignificant world. 

 

_ A frothy daydream _

_ Beforehand we understood (each other), I mean, we can go anywhere _

_ Right this instant, well, hurry  _

 

Her entire life she had only wanted to return to that flower field. She thought it was just because it made her happy to be praised, but maybe even for her there was a time where she had been innocent, there was a time she could be saved.

 

As she thought about that, she suddenly saw flowers bloom all around them where they were dancing. They were no longer in a cramped karaoke studio. Every time they took a step another flower bloomed. 

  
When she was younger, much younger than this, before she even knew what the CCG was or what she was going to do in the future she used to play in the flowers. Back then all she thought about was how pretty the flowers were. Even for her, there was a time where flowers were beautiful.    
  
There was a time where she did not associate beautiful things with death.    
Why did she forget about that? 

 

_ Don't forget, 'ey? _

_ I had cried because I won't forget somebody  _

_ Not until my breath stops _

_ I understand that surely you won't change  _

_ I carry (your) aged body _

_ I tried to deceive you secretly, isn't it a pity? _

_ Everybody, everything is a corpse _

_ even if they managed to run away _

 

Hairu’s head fell against Koori’s chest. It felt painful just to remember those things, even if they were happy memories. Remembering you were happy once did you little good when you were miserable now, remember you had a chance to become happy did nothing for you when you had failed to reach that happiness.    
  
She wondered why being around Koori in particular, always made her think of the outside world, of a world she had never been born into, of happiness she could never have. She would have been fine never knowing to dance, living in her narrow world of just her and Arima if Arima had ever just turned her way to look at her.    
  
Perhaps the end result or the choices she made did not matter. Regardless it would have been the same end result if she had been born with a half-life, or a full life, or a quarter-life she still would have died. Everybody, not just her, not just the garden children, everybody was a corpse, even those who ran away from the garden had died.    
  
If nothing mattered… then why did it hurt so bad when she thought about the fuller life Ui led?    
  
Ui suddenly grabbed her shoulders looking at her. “Hairu… There’s… there’s another reason I brought you to this karaoke booth.”   
  
“Hmmm?”   
  
“I called a reporter who's willing to meet to leak information. I want the world to know about what you went through Hairu.”   
  
“N...No, I can’t it’s against the rules.”   
  
“What good do rules do? They never once protected you they were made to exploit you.” 

  
The always strict Koori Ui was telling her not to care about the rules? There was something inherently wrong with that sentence. She wondered what had changed about Ui so much in six years.    
  
Perhaps she was greedy, assuming she could die, disappear, and come back six years later and Koori would remain exactly the same, the same teacher who wasted his kindness on her.    
  
“Hairu, just talk to her. It’s not fair everything that happened to you was forgotten.”   
  
“It wasn’t forgotten…”   
  
“Hairu, they didn’t even hold a funeral for you!” 

 

“...”   
  
“They didn’t even put up a grave!” 

 

“...”   
  
“You’re not the only one, what about Hsiao? Yusa? They’re still working with the TSC. Maybe they don’t feel like they have the right to leave. If the world knew about the garden then…”    
  
Nothing would happen.    
The sunlit garden had artificial sunlight and barren soil, nothing good could come from that place. If Ui tried to show the rest of the world what had happened there Hairu knew the only person that it would affect would be Ui.   
It would ruin him.

  
The TSC would ruin him the moment he let the secret go. It had been the same way, that was why Hairu was not allowed to talk about the garden in the CCG. Even if V was gone now, somebody else would replace them.    
  
She just realized there was one good thing about her dying so early. Ui was able to keep living without her. That poor hero did not feel the need to die for her sake. 

  
  


_ Maybe if you're reborn,  _

_ I'll take you to an amusement park, 'ey? _

_ Maybe if I'm reborn, I hope nobody mourns me  _

 

The last lyrics of the song played and Hairu took both of Ui’s cheeks in her hand. She opened her mouth for a moment to tell him how she really felt. All of those twisted up feelings twisted up her tongue even further, and just like her dream with Arima nothing came out of her mouth at all.    
  
“Can I go to the bathroom first? It’s embarrassing meeting a reporter looking like this.” 

  
“Ah… sorry, sorry.” 

  
Ui was far too polite.    
He fell for an obvious lie like that.   
She took a little too long to stop holding onto his face, and the moment she turned away from him she went to the bathroom and climbed out the window.    
  
It was a nice day, a nice distraction but the TSC was where she would belong. Perhaps Ui would give up all hope on her and leave the TSC, and get a job brushing horses or whatever other jobs there were out there.    
  
If he let go of her he could find his real princess one day. If he stopped being kind he would not be hurt so much. Those were the things she wanted to tell him, but she could not for some reason.    
  
Perhaps, as unworthy as she was she had liked that kind side of his.  
  


💀  
  


When Hairu left, Ui felt like there was no place left in this world for him. He ran to the only place he was familiar with, even if that person did not want him there. His mind was a haze and his body had moved on his own. Before he knew it, he was sitting next to Hirako. He tilted the glass back parting his lips. As he swallowed down the liquid, he hoped the poison he had chosen would kill him quicker than it already was.   
  
His stomach churned. He knew he was going to vomit this later like he was vomiting about half of his meals nowadays. He only hoped that no blood would appear in the vomit. The liquor loosened his lips. He had no idea what made Hirako agree to go out with him. He had no idea why he was even sitting next to him. He was silent as always. Was he trying to support him as a friend? The more likely answer was that when Ui appeared on his doorstep Hirako just could not be inconvenienced to say no.   
  
Utterly passive, it was like talking to a wall.  
One time Kuramoto held onto his arm and begged Ui to tell him that Hirako had a good reason for doing what he did. Before that Ui genuinely believed that everybody had to have a good reason. When he believed in justice he mistakenly thought that the world was a reasonable place. Kuramoto kept following him that day and he told him that Hirako always kept his feelings to himself, but Hirako must have believed in them right?   
  
Ui wanted to agree with him.   
That was the revelation that broke him. Ui thought that people fought because they believed in something better because they wanted to be better. He thought people in the world felt the same emotions he did. No matter how different they were, no matter what they believed, people must feel bad when they lose things, they must want to protect the other people around them. He did not comprehend the fact that people could just.  
  
Be so cut off from the world emotionally.   
Hairu, Arima, Furuta, and Take.   
He never thought that they could have their feelings destroyed like that.  
Then there was a far worse set of people. Ui thought that everybody should care as he did. That it was only natural. That people wanted to do the right thing but something stood in the way, society, villains like ghouls.   
He never considered the possibility that people just pretended to care.   
He wondered why they put on such an elaborate show of pretending. It was like a performance they were putting on where the only ones in the audience were themselves.   
  
The garden children were not the ones pretending to be human. Marude, and everybody else, since when had they all started pretending to be human? 

He did not know how friendship worked. He had always been a lonely guy, but he thought it was natural when you spent time together someone to want to care about them. People were born to be loved and to love others. No, people were not born for such a reason. People were born not to have their names called, but rather to be replaceable cogs in a machine.   
  
Ui took another drink. The alcohol loosened his lips. All of his thoughts started to swirl out at once. He felt like the were dripping out of his lips like he was spitting up black tar. 

“I hate this, I hate this so much and do you know what I hate? I hate Arima. I get that he hated himself, but that doesn’t excuse him treating us like that. We all worked tirelessly around him to earn the coldest of praise, and Hairu worked harder than anybody else.”  
  
Ui remembered attending Hairu's funeral. Her body had been destroyed and then stolen away so there was nothing to bury. Even so, he sat alone amongst the folded chairs. It was a small service, incredibly small, he was the only one who showed up. Wordlessly he stared at her funeral portrait as someone the CCG paid to read off information about the dead investigators en masse sounded bored praying to send her soul beyond. Ui looked at the chair next to him.   
  
Hairu told him so many times how happy she was going to be after Arima saw the results of the Rose Raid. Her only reason for living had been Arima. Now she was dead, and Arima had not even bothered to attend her funeral. The sight of Hairu's head rolling off the ground felt like every memory of her, his most precious memories were all destroyed and yet Ui still went. When he tried to remember her now it was like somebody had scraped off and damaged the image in the photographs, when he looked he felt like his own eyes his retinas were being scrubbed at so he would forget the details. Yet he still went, Arima did not bother to do that.    
  
Take did not reply.   
  
“...”   
  
“It’s different with you and me though we had lives we could go back to. The only thing keeping Hairu alive was being praised by Arima. And if he couldn’t… if he couldn’t lift a finger to do that one tiny thing for her then he should have at least told her.”

  
After her funeral service, a faceless investigator walked up to Ui and shoved a box into his hands. He did not hear the words that came out of the man's mouth. Afterward, he figured out that Hairu had not left behind a will or even written the last testament. He was lied to and told she had no living relatives so he would be responsible for taking care of the possessions she left behind. He was given a key to her apartment, but he wondered why the box. When he finally made it to that barren apartment he realized.   
  
That small box could fit all of Hairu's possessions. Her apartment had a bed, a night stand, and that was about it. The fridge was tiny and only contained convenience store food. She had a microwave which she must have used for everything. Ui looked at what was inside the box. There were small photos of the times they had spent together. Ui wondered why she had so little. Now he knew that it was all she had been allowed to keep. She could only have scraps of real life. She had been fighting ghouls all her life for scraps. Hairu was his most important person, someone so important to him was so insignificant to the world that her entire life could be shoved into one box.   
  
“...”   
  
“If he didn’t want her killing ghouls. If he thought killing wasn’t a praiseworthy thing he should have told her. Hairu would do anything for Arima did he really think she would ever betray him? If he couldn’t give her what she needed, he should have just told her.”  
  
Ui remembered how every time he asked Hairu to take a break, she said she had to work still. She had so small a life, and so little time and she never lived any of it for herself. She tried her best to live for the sake of another person. All of that time now was wasted. Hairu never got to smile for herself. She never got to have fun for herself. Each realization of something Hairu would never be able to do because she had given up all her time to Arima because she had died on the altar to Arima that was another fresh stab wound into Ui.   
  
He thought Hairu was enough. She was given so little and yet she lived. She was always smiling. She was bubbly. She tried to make the best of everything. When she got mad, she pouted like a child. She was so giggly. She made s many faces that were entirely unique to her. Nobody else could see the world the same way she did. It hurt, it hurt so much to know that Arima never saw how important she was. It hurt him to know that Hairu would never be able to accept that she was enough.  
  
She would never know how she was everything.   
She did not need to be an investigator.  
She did not need to kill.  
She just needed to be Hairu, Hairu was his everything.   
  
  
“...”   
  
“I don’t get it what did he want. If he didn’t want to be worshipped like a god why didn’t he stop Hairu from worshipping the ground he walked on? If he didn’t want Hairu to kill ghouls why did he make her break her own back killing as many ghouls as possible to earn praise he was never going to give her.”   
  
“...”   
  
“On that day, if Arima had told her to value her life a little more than she would not have gotten herself killed trying to take out that ghoul. When she was critically injured she could have run away, but the thought of Arima being disappointed in her was literally worse than death to her.”    
  
“...’   
  
“I get that he hated himself, I do. But just because he hates himself doesn’t mean he gets to pretend as nobody else exists in the world. How could Arima do this to her? To someone who cares about him that much?”

“...”    
  
“I hate you too because you knew all along. You knew exactly why Hairu was like that and you didn’t try to help her either. You didn’t try to help anybody in the garden, not even Yusa when he was all you had left and you were all he had left. You know better than him, you shouldn’t have let him go back to the TSC when it was on you to make the responsible decision. As long as you got to stay around Arima you didn’t care, gosh were you always like this or did he make you this way? Make him someone like him who can’t feel a damn thing, and only knows how to ben underling in the CCG.”   
  
“...”   
  
“I...I’m just blaming you and Arima. The ignorant one is me. I should have known that ghouls were more than that, I called ghouls monsters so many times when Hairu was right there. My two closest friends were ghouls all along, and I acted like some crusader of justice who was going to wipe them off the planet.”    
  
“...”   
  
“You should laugh, it’s funny. It’s a joke. I’m sure Furuta would be laughing.” 

“I don’t really laugh.” Hirako Take finally said as he took a drink.    
  
Take had not taken a single drink for himself that night. He simply watched quietly.    
  
“That’s why I hate you so much.”   
  
Ui took another drink.   
  
“But most of all I hate myself.”  
  
His everything was gone.  
He was not the knight on a horse, he was not the detective who solves the mystery and gets the girl in the end.  
He forgot he had spent the past six years doing nothing.  
He had forgotten that he was nothing. 


	9. Lo the Poor Peacock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hairu goes to visit some old friends.

If you were already a resident, then descending into the world of the dead was not as big of a deal. They might as well have installed a revolving door for Hairu. She had lived her entire life like she was dying, she surrounded herself by death, and she died in the most gruesome manner possible only to revive by random chance like it was nothing.   
  
She heard the chorus of groans coming from ghouls that were still interned in Cochlea. Those who were not able to live amongst human society in the new peaceful Tokyo and comply with the regulations of the TSC. Hairu had no idea if she could fault them for failing to assimilate. After all, she herself had once been more human than them, but she never had the feeling she belonged in the world of the living. Hearing the cacophony of pained cries, and desperate pleadings coming from behind the glass walls Hairu could not help but think this was a place where she belonged.   
  
As she descended each circle she already knew her destination. She had used her clearance as one of the black-suited investigators to make a meeting with him. The child who grew in the same garden as she did. Rather than white or red, however, his flower had grown up to be pitch black. Then the place she was heading to right now, the absolute bottom of Cochlea where SSS ranked level threats were kept might as well have been referred to as Cocytus. She did not want to give him the pleasure, an eternity chewed up again and again by a dragon was the end he desired for himself. It was too bad then the real nine-headed dragon which had killed so many and revived them all had to spit him out as well.   
  
This time Furuta had been prepared in an interrogation room ahead of time for her. Hairu had no intention of interrogating or even kicking a chair over for the third degree. She was here for petty revenge and nothing less. She had run away from those emotions that being around Koori had flooded her with, and still, they did not leave her. Six years worth of Koori’s emotions were too much for her, they would crush her with their weight. She wanted to reset herself, a reminder of who she really was.

  
Not some poor lovelorn ingenue who had never gotten a chance to see the world, there was no way a characterization so sympathetic and innocent could apply to her. She was an investigator. She killed ghouls, tore them up, chopped them to pieces, ripped their flesh, cut through them cleanly, pulled off their limbs, popped off their heads, and she smiled while doing it too. That was the kind of person she really was.   
  
When he walked into the doorway Furuta showed her an empty smile. The exact same kind of vacant expression Hairu had worn when she on the floor of the lunatic eclipse building waiting for the rose mission to begin. Hairu wondered if all garden children had been taught to smile that way, to smile simply by forcing the muscles to work to show the impression of smiling to others, a mockery of human emotion.   


“What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this?” Furuta called out over and over again, like the call of a Mockingbird. “What is this, my super cute younger sister is coming for a family visit? I thought you forgot about me, considering you never write.”   
  
She grabbed his head by his overgrown black hair and slammed it hard against the corner of the table, hoping she would break something. When Furuta raised his head again he tried to smile but several of his teeth were missing. He spent the next few clumsy seconds crawling around on the floor looking to where his teeth had gone off to and then forcing them back into his gums.

  
He sat back up again, put his elbow on the table and struck a pose holding his face in his hand as he cracked another smile all of his teeth back in place. “Five-second rule!” When Hairu raised her hand again Furuta did not move at all. “Hey, watch it I haven’t gotten dental insurance ever since I quit my job!” She had wanted to break that smile off of his face, but it seemed she could not even make him flinch. They had come from the same place, the fact that he could turn out so different from her, no from Arima was so disturbing to her.   
  
The pure white solemn Arima, the pitch black facetious Furuta. Shio told her that Arima had been beautiful in his death, whereas Furuta apparently died in a dingy pit, in the blood and muck, completely alone.   
  
Not that Hairu particularly cared about a nuanced opinion on the differences between the two of them. The person she loved was Arima not him, those feelings were all that was guiding her. Feelings were illogical things, they were glaringly bright colors they cared very little about the dull grays of nuance.   
  
“Y-you broke the rules!” Despite all of those emotions welling up inside of her all she could do was point a finger at his nose like she was a child.   
  
“I broke a lot of rules, that’s why I’m in the hoosegow. You’re going to have to be more specific.”   
  
“You told Koori-senpai about the garden. That was the one thing we were never allowed to do! Not that you’d know, you’ve always been a bad seed.”

  
“A bad seed? From that place?” Furuta raised his head just a little bit even though the action pained him and gave a closed-lip smile, catlike, “What exactly do you think was a good garden child? What was a good way to grow up from there?”

Run away from everything and steel bars fall on you, but oopsie that was him.   
Destroy everything and a hero of justice will come to kill you to end your villainy, also him.   
Try to make the best of your small life and live for love, die a gruesome death unloved.   
Just shut up, swallow it all down and still try to live on and do the right thing.   
In that case for staying quiet, you get further victimized and used for the rest of your life.

Dear little Yusa and Hsiao know all about that.   
  
“You always did exactly what the Washuu said, and do you know what they did they made good use of you. They didn’t even bother to throw you a funeral when you died, and then when you miraculously came back to the life  you got passed off to the Washuu’s successor.”

“What are you trying to do, prove that somebody else’s life was a bigger joke than your own?”   
  
Furuta shook his head, furious, though that fury was put on hold for a moment as he needed to recompose himself as shaking his head had been a little too much for his poor old creaky neck.  “No! Obviously, I want my life to be the biggest joke. Do you know anything about me at all? You’re a terribly cute little sister.”   
  
“We’re not even in the same branch Nimura.”

“Hmmm, but was Tsuneyoshi your father? Yoshitoki? Do you even know? Well if you’re curious you can ask my dear nephew Matsuri, unlike us he gets to retire and spend the rest of his life poring over the family records.”

“Y-you!” Was about all Hairu could stutter out. She had never been the type that was good at talking. “You’re just playing around with me, I don’t want to play tag with you Nimura, I don’t like you.”  
  
“Awe, but it was so fun to play games in the garden back then…”   
  
She had no idea if there was any sincerity in his voice at all but for some reason the idea that he might be sincerely aggravated her more than if he was saying this all in jest. The garden was the place where her and Arima’s precious memories were, Furuta did not belong there, any footstep he left would turn pitch black. The only flowers that turned black were dying or burnt up flowers. It was a sickening color.  
  
Furuta's head fell forward suddenly. His voice cracked as he spoke in a sharp whisper. Even talking that fast seemed to be a little exhausting for him. As he spoke, his unruly hair that looked like the hair you would find off of a corpse that had half rotted away fell away from his the eye it was supposed to be covering, or rather what used to be an eye. Hairu stared at the missing half of his face and wondered how he could even keep talking like this. It was almost like a yokai was whispering into her ear rather than Furuta. “You know, if you’re mad at me for destroying your precious little life at the CCG then you should be mad at Arima too he was planning to do the exact same thing. In fact, he had no intention of letting you in on his plans even though you were a garden child that wanted to be free the same as him. You were just fodder for him.”   
  
“I don’t care if Arima was planning to destroy the CCG too. I’m sure if Arima had lived if he was the one he would have done it in a good way unlike you.”

“What makes you so sure of that?”  
  
“It’s about who you are as people, not the place you came from, not what happened to you. Arima… Arima was good. He was… no, he wanted to be good. You… you’re poison.” Icky, sticky black, pesticides, herbicides, weedkillers, toxins, swallow them and they refuse to break down in the body, “You don’t know how to do anything but poison, and yet you still think you have to be involved.”   
  
After all of that, Furuta merely smiled the same as ever. There was venom dripping from the side of his lips, it only looked like blood because the same substance ran through his veins. “Nice try, but to be honest I don’t really even care that much about Arima. I would love for you to see me as a spoiled boy who was just upset he didn’t get his due, so he used his father’s power to destroy everything around him and then played the victim afterward I think that’s a lovely character I’ve crafted. It’s a perfect foil to Arima, the noble hero who did everything he could and sacrificed himself in the end. ”

She was hoping to hit him hard enough to leave a crack in his mask but he was happy, overjoyed at the fact that he was a despised villain. Hairu thought she could hurt him but she did not know. She did not know a single thing about him.   
  
She did not know him.  
She did not know what he liked or what he hated.

Only Furuta knew, and he watched with amusement at her attempts to hurt him.   
He had figured out that much at least.   
  
He himself despised humanity. He was the type that wanted to destroy humanity when he saw it. Humanity did not refer to the species, or even the species of ghouls, what he resented was that some of these so-called human beings were fully three dimensional and self-aware enough to call themselves persons, or so he had been told. A person got up in the morning, put their polka-dot socks on and suspenders, went through their day feeling happy, and sad, feeling all sorts of emotions welling up inside of them, they fell in love, they fell out of love, they fell into hate, they were kind, they were cruel.

A person was aware, and therefore aware of their own pain, aware of the fact they would die, and that was the kind of person he hated the most.  
  
A role was much more malleable than that. A role only existed in a narrative to fulfill its purpose. They existed for that short amount of time, and then the mask was taken off, the actor behind them went backstage and it was like the role never existed. A role never hesitated, it never questioned itself, or did anything to stop what needed to be done no matter how many times the actor faltered, that could be solved with a quick recasting, the role as written in the script would always stay exactly the same. Sure there were some avant-garde plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where the characters realized what temporary existences they were who would disappear the moment after their lines were given, but there was no need for such pretentious self-awareness in Furuta Nimura’s stage play.   
  
After all, Furuta was acting with the least self-aware theatre troupe on the planet. He wondered when did everybody forget they were just pretending to be human. They all started to believe in their roles again, heroes of justice, good daughters of investigators, scientists who wanted to delve into forbidden research only for the greater good, and someone who fought to protect both humans and ghouls.  
  
He despised people, to look at him like he was a member of the human race with thoughts and feelings of his own was the worst insult of all in his book. That was why even if he had not been on the stage for a while, even if he was coming out of a six-year retirement, he could reprise his role even if it only consisted of a mask featureless except for his painted on smile.  
  
Even if he was a veteran actor, one with a bad case of the shakes, a foggy memory that caused him to forget his lines midway through delivery and a voice that kept cracking he would do his best to keep performing the role the same way he did in the days of his youth. Ah, to be six years old again, now that he was seven and a half he felt ancient. At least if some members of the audience saw the foolish old man on stage trying to perform the exact way in his youth and ignoring the limitations of his body, they might at least have a laugh at his expense. 

Still, Hairu was desperate to tear off the rest of the mask that was already half removed and barely hanging on, to blame someone for all of this, to make him hurt as she did right now. She should have just asked nicely, he was a practiced veteran at playing the scapegoat. Instead, she played it rough, trying to jam her sharp nails under the sides of his mask and pry it off his face forcefully.   
  
He saw a spark appear in her otherwise empty eyes. Furuta had a habit of assuming he was the smartest in the room, for the simple fact that if he was not he would die. He had already written Hairu off but it seemed she came up with an idea. “We never played in the garden when we were younger, Nimura. The only one you ever played with was Rize.”   
  
“...Are you going to say I poisoned her too because that’s at the top of the list-”   
  
“There’s no way you could, that woman was poison herself, but since we’re talking about the happy memories we shared in the garden it’d be mean to just leave her out.”   
  
Furuta actually struggled against her but his body was weak from multiple harvestings and the constant suppressors he was on. He was beyond weak, calling him a puppet would have been dishonest flattery at this point. At least puppets could move when their strings were pulled the right way. He only moved reliably half the time, his joints made awful noises, and even with strings holding him up, he could barely stand on his own. His resistance was paltry against her, in fact, she might have damaged him worse in the struggle. Hairu grabbed him by the collar like it was a noose and dragged him down the hallway, past several protesting guards saying she had the clearance to do so.   
  
The one who was protesting the most however, was the boy whose neck her fingers were around like a noose. “Stop this, First Class Ihei! Be reasonable, we can’t both be the insane one!”

 

# 💀

Nimura and Hairu both had pale skin from growing up under artificial lights and spending most of their time indoors, but neither of them could compare to Kamishiro Rize whose skin and hair had both lost all of its original colors, it was chalk white. There were blackened areas where veins carrying RC cells ran underneath her skin. Her originally purple hair had been tied back behind her shoulders. Furuta wore a prisoner’s robe, and Rize wore what looked to be white hospital robes.   
  
The last time the two of them were together in white robes like this they played innocently in the flowers. There was no time which Furuta had been innocent but he had been ignorant once. They say ignorance is bliss or ignorance is happiness, there was a point where Furuta thought there was a happy future even for someone like him who could only beg for scraps at the foot of the Washuu table like a dog, as long as Rize was there to play in the flowers.  
  
No, he was someone far worse than a dog now that he remembered. Humans were sometimes kind enough to take dogs out the back and shoot them when they had an incurable illness. They were given the swift death to spare them the pain of dying, Furuta was not even given that. Living while dying, until living itself became an act of succumbing to a slow death.   
  
It was like Hairu said there was no growth for him. He was never going to become a beautiful flower. It's not something he could change with attitude or an optimistic view of life. His roots had been poisoned from the beginning with herbicides, all he could do was watch as the slowly rotted away without ever giving fruit. 

There were no flowers to play on now, the two of them were in a room of concrete where no flowers could grow they were together. Furuta greeted her with a smile. When he was younger he saw other garden children break into tears over their fates. When they were in pain when they felt like they were not going to become an investigator and be left in V forever when their friends disappeared, when their parents, Furuta had never seen the point in crying when something bad happened to you. If you lamented in your sadness for too long, you would simply die. That was the reality of the garden, so tears were a waste of time. When he was younger he taught himself to smile. It was just a matter of efficiency if he smiled rather than becoming miserable and dying he would waste less time. Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten how to do anything other than smile, but that too was just a matter of efficiency. All of those feelings and thoughts and emotions took so much out of you, and he had six jobs to work. It was an incredibly painful thing being a human being, he had no idea how people who were not born into the garden did it. He was too busy dealing with the pain of dying slowly so he filed that aside. That was why he showed the girl he had dropped iron beams on the exact same smile he was wearing on the day he snapped those cables because it was the same smile he was always wearing. “You should have done a better job of drowning Associate special class and eating me.”

Rize looked still and lifeless, like a portrait of a ghost and yet her eyes suddenly came alive and focused on Furuta. Who knows exactly what she had been looking at a moment ago, it was only then Hairu noticed the large kagune marks that had scarred the walls of her room. “I don’t like eating meat that’s already rotten, and don’t blame me when you were the one too weak to fight him.”   
  
They were easily able to talk to one another like no time had passed at all, but that familiarity only stung both of them. Even though her body was strange looking, forever changed by dragon Rize was still able to puppeteer her body around the same way a person might. Her red eyes focused on Hairu. Unlike Furuta who had every name from that place cataloged and memorized, she had not thought about the noisy pink girl in years and could not put a name to that face. If she could forget every person from that place that would be the best. Then she could continue playing the role of Kamishiro Rize, the ghoul who did not exist and was born from nowhere, the ghoul who would stomp on the head of her own childhood friend and rescuer in order to escape. She wished she could say she only ever used him and forgot about his name and face soon afterward, she would be much closer to the ghoul she was supposed to be if she did.   
  
The truth was though she had forgotten herself for a little while there, and had been observing herself in the mirror wondering how her body became like this as if she was watching her body from a third person. She moved her fingers around and felt like somebody else was moving them for her. It was a common thing, forgetting herself. She had her good moments and bad moments.   
  
It was not nearly as bad as before when everything was just dark. Even in a fully lit room like this she would see darkness and scream out for some kind of light. Even after her body left that dark place, her mind would not escape and she screamed names she did not remember for help.   
  
Now she was herself again, she was pretty sure. She lost herself sometimes, but at times like that, the sight of his contemptible face reminded her. The look of hatred her sharp feminine features made as they twisted up in scorn were the genuine thing, a real reaction from herself. The face she could not forget of the boy who once saved her, the hatred she could not forget of the man who destroyed her, both of them were wrapped up in the same person and both reminded them of who she was.   
  
Funny, she had always wanted to escape from herself. Having a beautiful face was convenient when she wanted to be lazy and pull people to her whims without much thought, but if she really could she would like to turn into the kind of monsters that Kakuja look like all the time. The kind of transformation where a person forgets every trace of their original self, where their origin point no longer matters. When Dr. Jekkyl becomes Mr. Hyde he loses every sense of restraint. She envied that freedom that only seemed to exist in fictional monsters. That was why she had been so glad she was born a ghoul, a monster right out of the storybooks, who most people believed had no true emotions and simply lived for the sake of deceiving humans and devouring them. She could not ask to have been born a better monster.   
  
She wanted to forget, but she did not want to forget. She thought she was better off acting the complete opposite way of her place of origin, but those moments when she slipped and could no longer remember the memories that formed herself when she truly lost control, she was terrifying.   
  
How unfortunate it was not to have been born a ghoul, a human eating monster after all, but to instead have been born a little girl.   
  
To Hairu though, all of the color drained from Rize’s face made what little remained all the more striking, pure red lips, and red eyes glaring at her. To Hairu she definitely looked more ghost than a woman. Finally, those lips pulled apart and words escaped, it took Hairu a moment to realize someone was speaking to her. “Did you want something? If you’re going to take up my time do try to be sufficiently less boring than staring at the white wall.”   
  
There was a pile of books at the far end of a featureless room, but they looked so well worn that it must have been awhile before any of them were replaced. “I just wanted to ask if you were hungry.” Hairu slapped the back of Furuta pushing him forward. “Because Doctor Kanou said it was your meal time.”

Kamishiro Rize, her mind had been torn apart by consecutive harvestings and then rebuilt by Dragon. She was a girl in the garden. She was a girl running away from the garden. She was starving. She was just a girl living peacefully with her father. She was a ghoul killing others. She was a ghoul being killed. She was killed again and again. She was destroyed finally. She was brought back. If she tried to make sense of that, whatever remained of her stitched together mind would fall apart.   
  
Not a single child in the room could make sense of what had been done to them. Not a single one of them could feel the feelings they were pushing away from them at all times. Because they were born in that place. Perhaps that was why, Hairu knew exactly what to do to push Kamishiro Rize the girl who seemed to delight in dancing on the edge of rooftops over the edge.   
  
Rize staggered forward grabbing at her head. “N-no, I’m not… I’m not hungry, I’m not going back to that place. This isn’t that dark place…”   
  
That dark place, the sound of flesh ripping, whose flesh was that again? It was her own. Her head, her neck, her arms, her legs, pulled away from her. She was a doll on an assembly line. She would be torn apart and reassembled. She was going to be mass produced.

There was no light at all. There was no consciousness, no thoughts in her head. Her only sensation was pain. How did her body hurt so much when she could not move it. She either felt nothing at all or she felt everything, and the shock between the two threatened to tear her apart.  
  
Tear her apart? What a joke. She had been torn apart and pieced together so many times that violence had become meaningless to her. Flesh, chunks, break, crack, blood seeping through the cracks, churning up her insides, the sound of flesh ripping. The worst part of all was how boring it had all gotten after awhile.   
  
If you tore a snake apart, as long as it was immortal even the wiggling bits would be left alive as long as they were sewed back together. She was those pathetic wriggling chunks, her immortality only caused her more pain as she was aware exactly what was missing from her and exactly what had been torn away. She could feel the pain of a missing limb. She could feel the pain of what was dead inside of her, because a living body longed to have parts that were alive. Gangrene was a fatal sickness that spread throughout the body like a poison. Because the body liked to be alive. It had no use for dead tissue. It wanted to live. Live, live, live, live, live, to live she needed to eat, to heal all of these broken parts she would need so much meat.  
  
Hairu smiled, delighting in it the same way she had enjoyed killing ghouls. She had enjoyed it, destroying those who were less human than herself. It proved what little humanity she was born with was strong. Breaking these two who were far more broken than herself, proved… what did it prove again? What did she want to be? An investigator of the CCG, but the CCG was gone, somebody Arima would be proud of but Arima was gone and Arima would hate a killer like her.  
  
Rize suddenly lunged for her before she could answer her own question but Furuta moved in the way first. She bit into his shoulder and wildly tore chunks out. Furuta himself smiled. The two of them tumbled around like they used to, but there were no grasses or flowers to lessen their fall only hard concrete. The wet and rhythmic sound of chewing filled the air and blood slowly leaked out of Furuta faster than Rize could lap it up.  
  
Yes, he much preferred this method of interaction. He thought Hairu was going to make him stand in her presence, and make him feel all those human emotions that everybody else was always going on about. This was much more preferable. If only the twisted connection that strangled both of them could be settled in such a simple way. He delighted at the feeling of his own flesh ripping, and the sound of wet chewing as she tried to swallow his flesh.   
  
He knew pain, and he knew death. He had always told Rize happily when they were children that he would let her eat him if he smelled so delicious.   
  
What he did not know was how that boy would feel about this. If that girl who played with him in the garden was still alive, and still standing in the same room as him. He did not know what that boy would feel like if he had been allowed to grow up.   
  
Because that boy was not supposed to grow up. He was not supposed to grow up and see his childhood friend again. He was not supposed to feel anything underneath that smile he was always wearing. Yet, despite growing up in an environment designed to strangle that boy when he was young and make him feel nothing, to bury him six feet under by the time that the boy was standing as tall as a man for some reason he still felt things.   
  
Crazy, right?   
In the environment that he grew up in, still feeling like a human being and having emotions even though he was less than half human and knew nothing at all about how people were supposed to act.  
Except for the roles that they played in movies, Disney movies particularly.   
Growing up like that some part of him still felt human. That was the crazy part. If he had gone insane and felt nothing at all, if he became a killing monster if he became ice cold like Arima he felt like that was a much more sane reaction. 

Still, Furuta hated this. If Rize regained some part of herself when she was around him and gained more self control than he ws the exact opposite. He lost himself. Suddenly, he was not in perfect control of his own body. He was not a puppeteer pulling the strings.   
  
He merely watched as that idiot, that boy that he hated took control of him again. As his body and lips began to move on their own. He did not want to be an innocent boy, he did not want to be the childhood friend of Kamishiro Rize, he was the one who chose to become the monster that betrayed her. He was the one who chose to grow up into the exact same kind of monster making a power grab in the Washuu that he had helped her flee from. 

“H-how the winds are laughing, they laugh with their might. Laugh and laugh the whole day through, and half the summer’s night…”   
  
His mouth cracked open and those twisted notes fell out, he sang in a soft voice and gripped the back of Rize’s hair. His fingers combed through the colorless hair, the scarred up and red torn hands contrasting that untouched pure looking white strands.  
  
Hairu planned to trick Rize into having a meltdown in front of Furuta but she had not planned past that point. It was oddly tender, the way they tore each other apart so easily as if Furuta already agreed his body belonged to Rize, or rather not his body but what was inside of it, soul, his person, whatever it was called.   
  
“D-d-donna, D-d-onna.”   
  
As he choked out the refrain between coughing up blood, Rize suddenly stopped. The fact that she stopped, seemed to hurt Furuta far more than tearing apart his body did. The fact that her eyes widened and looked at him with clear recognition. If she could see his face and remember it, she would rather he looked away so he could disappear better.    
  
“That’s right, if I ate you up you’d die.”   
  
“Yep, I’d die.” Furuta repeated back at her with a smile.     
  
She pushed herself off of him and walked to the corner of her room. She leaned her head in between the point where the two boring white walls met and stroked her own hair, again and again, trying to calm herself down.   
  
Hairu had been momentarily shocked, but she regained her sadism towards Furuta. She leaned over him offering him a hand. “You’re acting weird Nimura. Aren’t you going to brag about all the bad things you did to the binge eater with a smile, or is it different with her?”  
  
When Hairu was around Arima, she felt like a

* * *

little girl, she returned to the moment that he touched her head for the first time. She assumed the same was for Furuta, he was now a six year old boy who had never wanted to hurt anyone and only wanted to keep playing with his childhood friend, trapped in the body of the man who had torn her apart with his own hands, reliving the memories of those same hands being puppeteered to snap the wires that would drop the deus ex machina of iron bars onto the stage to break her.  
  
That was how Hairu thought about death. Arima Kishou had died. He slit his own throat. That was painful for Hairu, but he had only died once.   
  
Rize thought much differently about death, she had died one thousand times, and then one hundred and one times more, and each time it was by Furuta’s hand. Yet dying a thousand times she was still not even allowed the agency to die, so she was forced to live in that broken, yet patched together state haphazardly flipping between the two.   
  
Dying but unable to die, that was how Furuta thought of his life. He had scripted for his character to get killed, it was an important plot point some might even call it an emotional scene and sympathized with the beast in the end, but no matter how many times he performed that scene his character refused to die. The human named Furuta Nimura refused to die. He had no use for a human being, give him a minstrel, a jester, a bard, a comedian, but humans were practically useless.   
  
All three of them were born in a garden, they were given life, they were standing in a field of flowers together but all they could do was each of them contemplate death.   
  
Furuta stood up on his own and grabbed Hairu’s hand slamming her back against the wall. “You… you don’t do this ever again.” He was trying to sound scary, but he just sounded scared. He wanted to be an intimidating man but he sounded like a brat throwing a tantrum, screaming threats. “Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die. Go die.” The threat repeated again and again from chattering teeth.   
  
However, the one to pull him away was not Furuta himself but rather Rize. She grabbed him by the back of the neck and yanked him from Hairu. The two of them fell over the both of them landing against the side of the prison wall. 

 “I’m the one who dropped the bars on you you know, did you forget that? That’s why I can’t be around you.”

‘I told you not to say boring things, repeating yourself is boring.” Apparently, they had this discussion before. Hairu wondered if Furuta had ever been called in to calm Rize when she was getting into one of her fits They were each connected by that flower field, even if everything in that field had rotted away leaving nothing more than corpses and the dead earth behind. “I knew from the start, my last memory is seeing you standing on that rooftop and asking why it was you of all people there.”   
  
Rize said nothing. She simply curled her hand under his her chin and watched the flickerings of Furuta's face, as his face changed without him realizing. She was still stronger than him. She could throw him on the floor and break his fingers one by one, she could cut him open and eat his pulsating red organs, but none of those would cause him any pain. There was no point in torturing someone as numb to living as Furuta. That was why it made her oh so happy, that being around her made him remember again what pain was supposed to feel like, and more than that what living was supposed to feel like.   
  
Furuta remembered clearly, the boy all in white who stood like he was Michael about to cast Lucifer out of heaven, trying to convince him in those dingy pits in the bowels of Tokyo that life had meaning. He might as well have been lecturing a corpse.   
  
For Furuta, the ultimate betrayal was not that life did not have meaning, (well it didn't but that was a debate for another day), but rather it could have had meaning just not for him. While it was true that one could reject all the things that the structures in place told you had meaning and invent your own it was far different for a first-year college student surrounded by friends to do that than a garden child who grew up surrounded by corpses.   
  
Life was expendable. If he made friends the would disappear. If he did not make friends they would still disappear. The lesson taught to him over and over again in the garden. Even with a limited number of pathways before you, you could still make choices but even those always ended in death. Not only that but there was a time limit to the deliberation you had on those choices.   
  
He could have tried to live seeing value in the other people around him, trying to invent his own meaning for life and he would have died. He lived seeing value in nothing and knowing that it would all end the moment the toy chest fell shut and he would no longer get to play with others anymore, and he still died.  He could have shut everything out like Arima and lived only as a symbol to be either worshipped, or hated, never connecting to others, never feeling for others, never making a single choice for himself except for how to end his life, and he still would have died. He teared everything down around him and he died. He could have left everything in place and he still would have died.   
  
The immense weight of his inevitable death was not what had crushed him, until he became a one eyed doll with loose joints that creaked in horrible ways. If it was just a matter of dying, he could have died beautifully like Arima.   
  
More painful than dying, was wanting to live.  
More painful than life having no meaning, was wanting his life to mean something.   
Even raised amongst death, even raised as a tool that existed for the desires of the Washuu somehow.   
He kept on wanting no matter how much it agonized him.   
  
He blamed her.  
He was being petty, he knew it, and selfish too.   
When he was leaning up against that wall dying he saw it again. He heard the sound of someone laughing. His eyes widened when he saw it was his own laughter, but he was not the one laughing.   
  
Rather the boy who chased Rize around in the flowers to play was the one laughing. There was a time that he had smiled without thinking that he had to force himself to smile. There was a time where he laughed without that laughter being painful.   
  
There was a time he thought he had a future. He blamed Rize, he thought it was because he wanted a future with her. There was even a time he saw Rize as just another girl in the garden. Being around Rize made him remember all of that at once. 

As he felt tears well up from the corners of his eyes and fall down his face, he even remembered that he was capable of crying. Snakes were not even supposed to be able to make tears. 

  
“You knew… then what else did you…”   
  
Remember. Feel. Think.    
All of those things were what a person did. However, Rize wanted to be a person about as much as Furuta did. She wanted to be exactly the kind of untouchable, monstrous ghoul that the washuu always warned them about when they were younger, she wanted to be the big bad wolf who devoured helpless sheep. Rather than being stained, she wanted to be the one who stained others.  
  
It was a childish way of thinking, if I victimize everybody else in the world then I'll never be the victim again. Then again, how else was a child supposed to think? Garden children were not meant to grow up, even when they escaped.   
  
“You can’t ask me that. Those memories are mine. Mine. Mine Mine. You can’t take that away from me you’ve already taken everything else.”  
  
“You’re right...M-m-my apologies, “ he said it in an informal and stiff way and even lowered his head like someone was pulling on his strings forcing him to in a sudden jerking motion.    
  
Rize looked at the image in front of her of a peaceful crying boy, and realized it was like a beautiful portrait painted of a single moment of her childhood, and it was the exact kind of painting she would want to rip apart with her bear hands,s he dug her nails into his skull, sharp, and hard enough to break the skin and cause him to bleed. Blood did not show up on easily as black as it did on white. Perhaps that was why Furuta wore it, he could not bear to show any stains. “Are they harvesting you the way they used to harvest me?”   
  
“...Yes.”   
  
“How are you keeping your sanity.”   
  
“I don’t deserve to go insane, because if I did it would hurt less.”   
  
“What would?”   
  
“Everything.” Furuta looked up with one eye through his parted hair. “Are you happy that I’m being harvested? If you wanted, I’d let you cut out my intestines every day and do my best to regrow them even more delicious the next day.”   
  
“Even if you get harvested, even if it happens a thousand times like it did for me, that won’t fix what happened to me. Everything that happens to you has nothing to do with me.”   
  
“Of course. Once things are broken they can never be fixed.”

Once the toy chest lid fell down, they could never be played with again. Nimura Furuta was dragged back into living, but he did not learn some important life lesson from his second chance, he only further degraded farther and farther. He could only see himself becoming lesser and lesser each time. His greatest desire was just to smash that thing called a human being into pieces, to have it be permanently broken but no matter how much damage he did, it refused to shatter entirely. It could only live on becoming more and more broken.   
  
Perhaps being born with an early expiration date had been kind after all. He could not imagine living in this agony all of his life. He wanted to slice his brain away until only the medulla oblongata remained, he wanted to be reduced down to basic functions without awareness, he wanted to be hooked up to a machine and only be able to live because air was being forced into and out of his lungs and blood was warmed up and pushed through his ice cold vein then a power surge to hit frying his whole body, and the machines at once.  
  
Being destroyed all at once was better than slow decay, was it really because they were born in the garden, was it because they were made of plant matter that living to them was synonymous with rotting?   
  
“He’s much more human when he’s around you.” Hairu noted with a tilt of her head.   
  
“I hope it’s painful for him.” Rize said, words sharper than any kagune she could produce.

“I’m surprised that mess ever got you out of the garden.” Hairu said.  
  
Rize was able to chat easily with Hairu because she had no idea who she was, just a faceless investigator she did not care about. If someone she knew had brought up the garden perhaps she could not share old memories so easily. “He’s a clever one, even when we were younger when I was stronger and faster he usually won our games of tag.”   
  
“Does he love you? Is that why he’s acting like this?”

“You know he was a spoiled child in the garden. He never once felt anything for his father, but he loved his mother quite a lot. Every time she called him home he immediately stopped playing with me. I think he cared about her a lot more than he did me. Even after he learned the secret of what he was, he never resented his mother for giving birth to him.”   
  
Rize grabbed his hand, his scarred red hand and wrenched it away from it puppeteering his body easily. She bent his arm back and showed Hairu the skin so thickly scarred it looked like it was pulled tight on the bones underneath.   
  
“Everything he did, he did to try to make his mother happy but she was permanently sick from what that old man did to her. When we were planning escape, he said to leave it to him and I had no idea what he would do. Then suddenly his mother fell ill and died.”   
  
Hairu heard the sound of breaking bones as she twisted Furuta’s wrist around further so he could not hide his hands, human hands, even if all they were good for was strangling others.

“Furuta loved his mother so much when she fell into a deep depression, so she would not be worried he started doing everything for her. He’s amazing at multitasking, he cleaned, prepared food for both of them, and kept up with his studies and training as well. That still wasn’t enough and she died on him.”

A sickly smile spread across Rize’s face, the same one Furuta was always wearing. They were like reflections, they could destroy each other not because of how opposite they were but rather how close. You had to be close to truly destroy someone, that was why Furuta always pushed people away and Rize always ran away on her own. Pushed people away was a nice way of putting it. Furuta made sure to hang them up on strings so they never got close, and Rize trampled corpses underfoot.   
  
The two children running away at any cost, not caring about the bodies the left in their wake, the selfish, reckless, greedy children who thought the entire world was the playground for them to work out their issues.   
  
“Well I’m not being fair she died because he snuck rat poison into her food one day. Then, when the old man was mourning the death of one of his side chicks, the coffin suddenly burst into flames while the whole garden was there. Furuta ran up to his mother’s burning body to try to extinguish the flames with his bare hands but that was all for show. You lit the fire to create a distraction to let me escape. You know I consider myself unstable and ready to betray everyone to cut and run at a moment’s notice, but I didn’t see that coming.”  
  
As Furuta heard this story he made no expression at all. This was usually the time for an emotional flashback. Perhaps he could regale all of the audience inside of his own head with a detailed description of how he ran to his mother's casket screaming the moment it burst into fire, and how his hands got burned because he tried to pull her body out of it. He could even say he saw the pitch black look in his eyes and saw something darker than darkness.   
  
He could even remember after he had been pulled away kicking and screaming from the funeral servie of his mother, how the first thing he did was immediately run to Rize and take her by the hand with his still burnt hands and smiled at her like nothing had happened at all. He could regale the audience with how what he felt inside did not match at all the smile he was wearing on his outside face.   
  
He could even tell them what exactly was going through his mind when he sacrificed his own mother to create a window of escape, but then just as they reached the outer edge of the sewers that were connected to the 24th ward that Furuta instead of escaping with his friend chose to stay on the other side.   
  
However, the funny part was Furuta himself did not even particularly remember these things in detail. If he tried to conjure the images to mind he just saw Kanou in a wig dressed as his mother. Apparently, he had been successful enough at smashing part one small part of his former life. The little boy he hated so much had a crack in his skull, he could not even remember his saving grave, his last final act, his farewell preformance, his spider's thread to rescue him from hell.   
  
He just saw the bright oranges of flame, heard the wet sounds of their feet moving through the 24th ward, and remembered the sickly smell of turpentine. Did he kill his mother? Rize would probably know better than him, she knew the parts of him he wanted to throw away. That sounds like something he would do. After all, his mother was always so sickly, it was like living itself was an illness to her, death will cure you! :D   
  
What would have made little Furuta Nimura happy was to stay in the garden forever with Rize and his mother, but he did the opposite of that. He destroyed that happiness shattering it like it was a sheet of glass he was standing on, and let himself fall downwards. His hands poisoned his mother, and burned her corpse up. Murderous hands, but the first person he killed was not his own mother. It was the boy who had once played with Rize in the flowers. He strangled his childhood self, and all his good intentions, and hope for the future to do what needed to be done.

Feeling she had significantly demonstrated the kind of fool Furuta was, that she had humiliated him by exposing him Rize finally let him go. Hairu had no idea if she had gotten what she wanted. She wanted Furuta’s smile to break and go away, she wanted to see him stop strutting around so proudly like he was some colorful villain. If he was a peacock she wanted to tear out all of his feathers, until none of the colors remained, and she saw no more of those eyes watching her.  
  
Yet what she saw now, in Rize, in Furuta, it was too much like herself. Every plant that grew in the garden was infected with that sickly black death. Hairu had nothing else to say so she grabbed Furuta and dragged him away to quickly cover up the mess she had made.  
  
“What do you mean once things are broke they can never be fixed?”   
  
Hairu asked, but she regretted the moment she did. She slammed her hand over her mouth like it had slipped from her lips in an accident.   
  
“If Arima had praised you, do you really think you would stop killing?”   
  
“...” She had been imagining the moment when Arima praised her the entirety of her life and yet she could not answer that question because she had never once thought about what came next.

“You’d never stop. You’d just keep wanting more and more. No matter how much token praise he gave you it would never be enough to fill up what’s inside of you. It was better he didn’t even bother, I think.”  
  
Furuta’s hair eclipsed his face, and she finally noticed how ragged he was. He looked like a doll that was barely sewn together, stuffing coming out at all of his seams. It was easy to ignore how damaged he was when you only looked at that infuriating smile. “Rize was like that too. Unlike us, Rize escaped the garden she lived outside of it for most of her life. The moment she left she lived in the sixth ward with her adoptive father. He loved her unconditionally expecting nothing in return, to the point he would die for her. Could you imagine if Arima had loved you that way, like you were the most important thing in the world for him, and you didn’t even have to kill to earn it?”

Her entire body started to shake in revulsion. She was not even sure who that disgust was pointed towards anymore. Her body might be revolting against herself, trying to escape the wretched frame like her skeleton could run away and leave her skin behind. 

“You’d still kill. Love can’t paper over the cracks. If it could it would have worked for her, the noble sacrifice of her childhood friend would have allowed her to live her life in peace away from the garden, but it didn’t. She killed as she liked, and V spotted her. She thought she was running away, but all she ever did was run in circles, her foot was in the garden the entire time and she never even realized.”

A mad girl, dancing in a garden under the moonlight, Kamishiro Rize.   
Even if that was true what Furuta did to her was not deserved. Hairu was starting to question if anything that happened to the garden children was what they deserved.   
  
She threw him back in his cell and did not even look at what face he was making. Ihei Hairu ran away from Furuta’s harsh reality as much as she had from the soft and pleasant dream, she could stand neither so she ran away from them both. Perhaps she was running away from everything.   
  
It was not like the garden had taught her anything about living. She would run away from life itself if she could.   
  
Left to his own devices Furuta tilted his head back. The scent of flowers began to fill his nostrils and his eyes watered. Perhaps it was just a trick of the light, or the crocodile tears of a seasoned performer.   
  
He was interrupted by a sudden knocking on his cell wall. He put his ear against it, and heard the scratchings of a rat.   
  
“Hey boss, I’m bored of playing messenger boy. Make me a permanent part of your gang now."   
  
Hajime was on the other side of the wall. Dealing with two people in one day, human beings were so exhausting.   
  
“If you’re bored than find Ui and lead him to Uta. I’m sure you’ll have fun from seeing what he’ll do next after that point.”   
  
“You’re not leading me to my death again are you boss?”   
  
“Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe you should be careful and wear a helmet.”


	10. Slapstick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uta's mask shop gets new customers.

As Uta finished a particularly long day getting acquainted with Koori Ui, he remembered a certain passage from a Kurt Vonnegut book.

 

_ This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry -- like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. It is about what life feels like to me. _

 

_ There are all these tests of my limited agility and intelligence. They go on and on.  _ _  
_ _ The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy seems to me, was that they did their best with every test.  _ _  
_ _  
_ _ They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account. _

 

The day started in earnest with a little irony, the two walked out on stage, Ui, and Hajime. If his life was reduced to a stage play, Uta thought that his mask shop would make a particularly interesting set piece what with those stairs that probably symbolized a descent into an unknown, and the Sun which served at the symbol of insight on the HYSY art mask studio’s sign.    
  
One must descend into unfathomable depths to acquire true knowledge, a paradox, the sun of insight only being visible after having braved the shadows, or even hidden deep within the shadows. What wonderful symbolism. 

 

“Remind me why I keep following you into dark alleyways?” Ui asked, not really appreciating the symbolism.    
  
“It’s because you have nothing better to do with your life,” Hajime answered him.    
  
“You know just because it’s right doesn’t mean you should say it, that’s rude.”   
  
“Children are supposed to be rude. If we weren’t adults would have nothing to do all day.” Hajime folded his hands behind his head and smiled. 

 

Koori Ui said as he was led to Shinjuku, or rather the 4th ward. He was not particularly stunned to learned that the long sought after target of the CCG No-Face, was in fact still in the 4th ward all along and lived in a legally registered mask shop. It also did not surprise him one bit that No-Face, former leader of the fourth ward, remnant of the clowns, former co-conspirator with Furuta and V, also had not paid his taxes in several years. That piece of information was given to him by Hajime, via Furuta.    
  
They should have tried to get him on tax evasion rather than send Arima and Take after him. He might have been more frustrated by this revelation if he considered himself an investigator anymore.    
  
He wondered what he was now. A teacher who did not teach anybody. An investigator who had never known the truth. “I’ve no good as a teacher or an investigator, Hazuki-kun what do you think that makes me?”   
  
“Don’t they call someone who isn’t good for anything an idiot?”    
  
“What does that make you then?” 

  
“Well, obviously I’m a brat.”   
  
“Do you get paid for that?”    
  
“It’s a lifelong hobby of mine. I love it so much I’m willing to do it for free.” 

 

When they reached the door of the shop Ui expected it to open all on its own, like one of those doors at a spooky mansion. He was almost disappointed when it did not. He reached forward and opened it and saw a black and white tile floor extend out in front of him, exactly like old demon Tsuneyoshi’s office had.    
  
The owner of the shop was clearly an aesthete. Ui knew nothing about living for the sake of aesthetic, he barely knew about living anymore to begin with but if he had to describe the shop it reminded him of an old claymation film Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. In the sequel of the film there was an island where all the toys that were broken, or made wrong ended up called the island of misfit toys. Everything that did not fit in seemed to coalesce in this shop, like the tides of the sea brought it to the island and washed them up on shore. Ghouls of all kind, unable to fit anywhere must occasionally be brought here by the tides. Ui had not met No-Face once before this point not even crossing blades with him in battle, but he got the sense that to the hands of this island all the misfits were equal to him, because they were still all toys to him.    
  
Masks of all different kinds, a bull, a dog, an oni, a half skull, a panther, an insect, a Kamen rider, he felt like he was being stared down by an army of ghouls. Ui was so taken aback for a second he almost knocked one of the mannequins over, which prompted Hajime to laugh.    
  
To calm himself down he drew a cigarette to his lips. He held the lit match in his fingers for a moment, flicking it about in the air. Just as he was about to bright the light to his cigarette he suddenly saw a sheet be thrown off a statue of a unicorn, to see a man with two black eyes sitting on top of it. He blew out the light and politely smiled. 

  
“No smoking in my shop please.”   
  
“But you’re a ghoul.”    
  
“Humans come to this shop sometimes. There’s an old lady I don’t want to get sick.”   
  
“I don’t think she can inhale secondhand smoke if she comes by a few hours after this.”   
  
“You’re right, but what if she smells the cigarettes? I don’t want her to think I’m a delinquent.”   
  
He was almost certainly a delinquent and yet oddly, Ui could not shake the feeling that he was not lying to him. He was the type of person who seemed oddly genuine for a liar, that was the impression that Uta gave him.    
  
The unicorn he was sitting on was chipped, was once colorfully painted even though most of the colors had faded by now, and a pole in the middle which Uta lounged off of. He switched the position to which he was lounging to something more seductive when Ui looked at him again. He was almost like a cat that only wanted attention when he decided he wanted attention and then he practically begged for it, but at all other times that quiet existence in front of him would probably blend in perfectly with a stretch of pitch black and silent night.    
  


Anyway back to the unicorn which was extremely important, Ui was not slightly flustered by this stranger and looking at it to distract himself or anything. The unicorn looked like it had been stolen from a carousel in the middle of the night, kidnapped from all of its brothers. Uta insisted later that he had never stolen it and had just bought it a a thrift shop, but Ui did not believe him. He also insisted that the only reason he did not pay his taxes was because they were confusing. That seemed more believable after meeting Uta.    
  
Hajime finally made a fuss at Ui’s side. “Hey, Hey, Boss said if I did these errands for him he’d tell me where you guys were. I’m Hajime I want to join your gang.”   
  
“Wait is that the reason you came here? You’re too young to join a gang.” Even though Ui was in far over his head to the point where he walked into the house of a ghoul who was still dangerous enough to carry a ranking unarmed he still had the time to lecture.    
  
“Hey, joining a gang can’t be any worse for me than joining the CCG. Besides, I’m tired of hanging around with all those zombies they’re such stiffs.”   
  
Hajime paused a moment waiting for everyone to laugh at his joke.    
  
“I suppose you’re right but…” Ui notice that Uta was pouting somewhat from not being paid attention to. “I’m Koori Ui, former Special Class and Current Vice Chair of the Academy.” 

 

“Oh?” He tilted his head as if surprised. “Are we introducing ourselves? Then I’m Porpora Donato.”   
  
“No, you’re not.” Ui quickly snapped at him.   
  
“I’m Itori.”    
  
“I don’t even know who that is.”   
  
“Really, you should meet her she’s quite fun.” Realizing his trick was not going to work he gave up, his black and red eyes finally meeting Ui’s. Ui got the sense that if he knew Uta for the rest of his life, he still would probably only get the other to look him in the eyes this one time. “I’m Uta, then. Maybe.”   
  
“Cut the intrigue already!”   
  
“But what’s a good mystery novel without intrigue?” 

 

“This isn’t a mystery anything, Furuta sent us to you because you had information we needed.”    
  
“Furuta…” For a moment Uta looked like he wished he was a bartender or this meeting had taken place in Itori’s bar so he could dramatically put his drink down for emphasis. Ui cold tell because he gazed longingly into his empty hand for some prop to gesture with. “I haven’t heard that name in awhile, I guess this is serious then.” 

Suddenly, Uta jumped off of the unicorn. He grabbed the bottom hem of his shirt, a loose black tank top with some kind of pattern that Ui’s eyes refused to make sense of, and pulled it over his head. He revealed a well-muscled body that looked like a marble state that had been painted over with all kinds of graffiti, Ui saw something that looked like a coiled Chinese style dragon, a circle of crosses, and a sun on his chest high above it all.    
  
“W-what are you doing?” He reacted a moment too late because he had been staring and quickly put his hand over Hajime’s eyes.   
  
“Awe, come on,” Hajime complained.    
  
“This is serious, I should put on my serious clothes. It might help me if I dressed for the mood.” When a pair of pants was tossed at him and hit Ui in the face, Ui got the distinct feeling that he was being messed with.    
  
There were several tattoos on the man’s back as well, including one tramp stamp with greek lettering but Ui did not feel like it was polite to stare so he did not let his eyes linger long enough to describe them. 

 

A moment later Uta returned pulling one of his arms into the sleeve of a black suit jacket. His white collared shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, and his tie was hanging off of him barely tied in a sloppy knot. When he finally got his arm through the sleeve Ui frowned.   
  
“You can tuck your shirt in at least.”    
  
In response to that, Uta rolled up one of his sleeves exposing the tattoos that ran down his hand all the way to his fingernails and then kept the other sleeve rolled down to make his appearance even more uneven   
  


“You were really bored today until just now, weren’t you?” Ui said in response.    
  
Uta went and got a rolling chair, rolling it back rather loudly on the tile floor, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, he probably did not want to fix the squeaky wheel because the sound annoyed others so much. He had decided to sit in that to hear their request, rather than the unicorn. He still sat in it wrong though, with more than half of his body leaning off of it.    
  
Ui was glad he had not met this man six years ago because he probably would have given himself a stomach ulcer by this point just watching him. 

  
Hajime finally spoke up, he had been excitedly watching the show the whole time as if Uta was an eccentric celebrity rather than a weirdo living in a basement, “Furuta sent us to you. He said he wanted you to gather the remnants of the clowns to do a prison break of Cochlea. He wants to get Rize out.”   
  
“Hmm, how noble of him.”   
  
“He told me to laugh if you said that so, haha! He says it’s only because he can’t stand being in the same building as her. He said you can eat her if you want once she’s out of his sight.” 

  
“Now, now, that’s not a very nice thing to say.” Uta tilted his head, it was like everything had to be off balance for him. “Okay, I’ll do it I guess.”   
  
“You’re agreeing way too easily! You don’t even know us!” Ui snapped at him.   
  
“Okay, on one condition.”   
  
“Damnit, I just made things more difficult.”    
  
“You have to break Furuta out of that place too.”   
  
“Why do you want that?” Ui asked.   
  
Uta’s eyes were wide and vacant. As he spoke he remembered descending all the way down to the twenty fourth ward one final time to see if there were any interesting stragglers after the dragon debacle. In the ruins he found what looked to be a man fused with the wall. At first Uta thought that the wall was devouring him, but as he got closer he saw that the wall was healing him instead. His clothes were torn into rags and he was curled up as naked as a baby. Uta wondered if Furuta had ever looked so innocent in his life, given that he was born in the garden probably not.    
  
Then again no children were innocent. They were all born tainted with original sin, even if they were humans born to parents who loved them, even if they had older siblings who loved them, eventually one day that family would fall apart and they would die. If anything garden children were luckier Uta thought, they held no false allusions of beauty. Anything that was beautiful about them would wilt so quickly, they had no time at all to get delusional. It was a mercy for them to die so quickly.    
  
His hollow kagune like the long limbs of an insect grew out and severed Furuta from the wall. He considered for a moment just stomping on his head and crushing it. Severing all of Furuta’s awareness of this world in an instant, and turning his brain into nothing more than primordial soup. If he was truly Furuta’s friend, he would probably do something kind like that.    
  
Before his foot could even rise though he hesitated. Naked with his hair slicked back by blood like that, Uta for some reason could not stop seeing his own face on Furuta’s. It was not like he was that old cliche of having shifted his face too many times that he forgot what his true form looked like. If Uta did have a true form though he would not want it to be a human or a ghoul, if he was a shapeshifter that could shift into anything he would want his original true form to be a watermelon. No particular reason he just occasionally felt like becoming a plant.    
  
Once he saw his likeness in Furuta’s features though it became impossible to break his own face. Not out of self love, but rather self loathing. Renji had reached a hand out breaking through the glass atmosphere of his dying world, and Uta had been desperate enough to cling to that hand. He saw death all around him, he practically lived in death, he knew death was inevitable, he refused to get involved with life because he knew death was waiting, nobody’s hands were more blood-soaked than his, and for petty, and cowardly reasons and yet no matter how many times he embraced death and lived like a shinigami he was absolutely terrified by death. It was so exciting, racing towards the edge, leaping off, and even the plummet down falling to his death made him feel more alive than anything in life did, but he would always get afraid the exact second before he crashed into the rocks. 

 

He had left his fragile world, hoping to find a world of warmth where things lasted and death did not exist. Instead, all he found was a world where things died much more slowly. He supposed that was better, better than the shallow world he lived in before, the quickly rotting one, but it was not like things died slowly in Renji’s world for any good or noble reasons, it was just stagnation that made it that way.

  
He believed Renji held within him all the answers, the key to the tattoo around his neck that felt more and more like a chain necklace holding him prisoner, and yet he would later learn that was false. No, perhaps at the moment he found Furuta he already knew it was false, that no such answers ever existed, and he was bitter over that. Bitter that he had been so desperate to live to cling to something that he took that hand, and came back down from the high to go on living his empty life.    
  
He was bitter, and petty, and he wanted revenge so he took it out on Furuta as well. Cruelly, he dragged him out of the dingy pit in the 24th ward where he had died, and cruelly he wanted to force him to live. Until Uta realized he had no idea how to take care of someone or make them live, so he just dumped Furuta on the TSC’s doorstep instead.    
  
He had already learned the lesson about having to live on even if life was empty and there was no reason to do so, he didn’t also want to learn the lesson about taking responsibility for others in your life, that was two lessons and he was a slow learner.    
  
“I don’t want the TSC to keep Furuta prisoner anymore. It’s not very interesting keeping someone like Furuta in a box. The world has gone stagnant.” 

 

“Man… now I feel especially bad that the only person besides me who realizes how messed up everything is, is the guy from the tattoo parlor.” Ui said.    
  
“This is a mask shop.” 

 

💀

 

Just like that the two of them gained a co-conspirator for their brewing plan. 

  
Uta told them he never really felt much for his parents, but he reasoned they must have loved him. They gave him such a pretty name, almost musical. He could not imagine giving that name to a child you were indifferent to. 

 

Ui wondered if Uta judged everything in life as an aesthetician. 

 

When they asked him what his connection to Furuta was, Uta mysteriously covered one of his eyes with his hands. At which point Ui snapped at him to stop acting out just for the sake of attention. Uta frowned again but complied and claimed for all he looked like he was a completely normal ghoul.    
  
“Then why do your Kakugan never turn off?” Hajime asked.    
  
Uta looked incredibly thoughtful for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sure there was a good reason for it, but I forgot.” He was either wearing a mask trying to deceive them into thinking that he was an airhead so they would let their guards down, or he was just genuinely an airhead. 

 

Despite being biologically a normal ghoul he was a member of the garden. Not one of the breeders, or the half breed children, instead he was the son of two cleaners. The Washuu also did favors for certain ghouls such as Kuzen, bringing in high level ghouls that were not risking raids against to take down with briberies of safety, and food. Those who sat on the throne never starved or wanted for anything. His parents were two such ghouls who had made such a bargain.   
  
Uta had no idea if they had had him, and his brothers and sisters out of love, or if they were required to by the Washuu to create successors. All he knew was that they always bowed in absolute obedience to the Washuu. They lived particularly empty lives and had no problem at all living all the way down in the fourth ward and only seeing the sun for limited amounts of time. They did not even seem to notice how lacking their lives were in comparison to everyone else.    
  
Uta was constantly made to be quiet and sit still, and no matter what never cross the Washuu or disobey one of their orders. His parents were terrified of having their sole source of security in this world taken away from them. His parents also seemed to genuinely buy into the beliefs of V, that ghouls were fundamentally evil, that humans and ghouls could never come to understand each other and would always seek to devour one another, therefore it was necessary for the sake of both species that a twisted balance be kept and that V were the righteous arbiters of that balance. They tried every day to make Uta understand that same doctrine.   
  
But as previously stated, Uta was a slow learner. He almost wanted to see if it was possible that humans and ghouls could come to an understanding, just to see his overzealous parents proved wrong.    
  
Then one day, his parents died. 

Just like that, the teenage Uta was ordered by Kaiko to serve as their replacement. He was not the oldest or the youngest, but he happened to be the strongest by far.    
He was told his first mission would be silencing the Yasuhisas, a family whose business success had been financed by the Washuu in return for using their mansion for the site of inhumane ghoul and human splicing experiments. 

He tore through the mother easily. The father came at him with an ax, and Uta laughed as it bounced off of his body.    
Then he saw the two daughters staring at him with fear in their eyes.   
Uta had not realized the cruelty of his actions until just then, it was the first time he had ever eaten fresh meat, all the other ghouls into the 24th ward were always so cold and rotten scurrying about in the shadows like they were rotten corpses still walk-in through the underworld. 

It would be unkind to leave two children in this world without their parents, he realized. They would probably get bothersome tasks pushed onto them just like him.    
The blonde and feral looking ghoul picked up the axe off the ground and raised it above his head. His body was twisted up and his face was not visible under his mop of hair. Yet at the moment he really was thinking it would be kindest if he killed the daughters. That way the family could be all together. He stopped himself at last moment, realizing he did not care that much about these random humans. They could live and suffer for all he cared. He threw the axe to the side and looked at where the underground tunnels that this house was connected to would lead him.   
  
Freedom.   
  
Apparently, all of his parents efforts to indoctrinate him to be obedient to the Washuu had completely failed. He ran away at the first chance he got and wound up in the fourth ward mostly by coincidence. He heard Shibuya was the fashion capital of the world, but he got his directions wrong and headed to Shinjuku instead.    
  
Uta never thought he had any special connection to his parents or his siblings, and yet once they were gone he realized how much he hated to lose them. Once things were gone, they were gone forever. There was nothing beautiful about a corpse, to him it was only meat, it could not move in any interesting ways. He felt no particular love or connection to things that were around him too, but the moment they were gone he felt like a part him was missing, and that part could never be replaced.    
  
If that was the grief that people who were attached to things, people who were in the middle of things rather than on the edge felt, then he had no idea how they were able to live through such constant pain. Renji once told him that he should live while losing, but Uta thought it was the opposite, to live was to lose. If most people lived much more connected lives than he did Uta almost could not blame them for spending their entire lives trying to distract themselves from the pain. 

 

He was made the leader of the fourth ward because he was strong, and he tried that for awhile, before he got bored and went off to try some other thing. Then one day a member of V calling himself Souta tracked him down, saying he had left a clear trail from the time he escaped from the Yasuhisas that made him easy to follow, and also that he had not done any of his taxes on this property since the year he opened his shop. Uta said Itori had done that for him and helped him open the shop but stopped helping him every year after that. He then asked Souta if he was famous, and if Souta was a fan.    
  
“So that’s my secret. I’m actually a natural blonde, I just dye my hair black because I don’t want to stick out.” Uta said in a voice lacking any emotion.   
  
“Who would possibly think that was the important part!?” Ui snapped at him. 

 

“Mm, so anyway.” He just ignored Ui’s quipping at him despite clearly trying to provoke him into playing straight man. “That was a testimony. I’m in contact with a few other stragglers who escaped from the Washuu.”

  
“More clowns?”   
  
“Nah, most clowns were just normal ghouls. It’s not like the Washuu were all evil. They were all trying to live normal lives at one point that’s what drove them especially insane.” 

  
“Yeah, whatever.” Ui seemed kind of tired of Uta’s whole schtick.    
  
“If you collect those testimonies and release them all at once to the news media there’s going to be a media storm about all the things the TSC failed to disclose to the public about the Washuu while effectively recreating their whole system. The TSC will have to defend themselves that they won’t fall to the same levels of corruption even with the old systems of unmitigated power in place. Most people aren’t good or evil you know they’re just kind of meh, but systems like the academy, the garden, the rank, and file hierarchy can push them into accepting all kinds of evils.”    
  
Uta made such a thoughtful point that Ui was so stunned he could not interrupt, even when Uta paused to give him time to interrupt with another quip.    
  
“Well anyway it will be like when Takatsuki released her book and there were protests, the protests are a good distraction for the chain of command so it’ll give us the perfect stage to infiltrate Cochlea and sneak out Furuta and Rize.”    
  
Uta’s tattooed fingers closed upon his empty palm as he finished speaking. However, he had one last request to tack on.   
  
“When you’re going to collect the stories though, you should bring me with you.”   
  
“Why?” Ui asked.    
  
“I want to hear them. Don’t worry, I’m a good listener.”    
  
“You better not be rude or insensitive to them.”  Ui had given up mostly on fighting ghouls these days but he would pick up Taruhi again and carve the ghoul in front of him’s face out if he made Hairu cry just because he thought it would be an interesting thing to see.    
  
Uta pouted once again at how little credit he was being given. “You don’t need to tell me not to do that, I’m a big boy.” 

 

💀

  
  


As they climbed up the stairs that led them away from the shop and back into the real world once more, Ui stared at the note Uta had given him with his phone number written down. There was some kind of message scrawled on it too but Ui could not read it.    
  
“His handwriting is completely illegible, this is awful, he should just get a business card.” 

 

Uta had, in fact, grabbed a notebook tore out a piece of paper with his name written on it when Ui asked him for a business card so he could call him again.    
  
The moment they began walking through the alleyways once more, Hajime became fidgety. He looked like a child who raised his hand in class and wanted desperately to be called on. 

 

“What is it?”    
  
“Yusa… Shio, and Rikai we should involve them in this raid too.”   
  
“They’re… those two are alive too?” Ui sighed in relief. “I’m glad.”   
  
“Don’t look like such a sap you’re not even the one who killed them. I was.”   
  
Ui shook his head. “That’s not true. There were children fighting in that battle and I didn’t even notice it if I cared about anybody other than myself and my own grief at the moment I should have stopped them.”    
  
Hajime was suspicious. “Why are you acting like that suddenly? Do you think you can make up for what happened all the way back then now? Six years later?”   
  
“No… I can’t ever make up for it.” 

 

“Then why are you doing this?”    
  
“There’s nothing I can do to make up for it, but that doesn’t mean I can just sit here and do nothing either.”  

 

“Why?”   
  
“You’re like a kid you know, why, why, why, why…”   
  
“Just answer the question, old man.” 

 

“Well, even if there’s nothing but bad choices you still have to choose you know. I’m sure this is the wrong thing to do and I’m upsetting a lot of people, but you know… nobody in her whole life chose her. Even if she did bad things, Hairu was at the absolute bottom of the totem pole, her suffering wasn’t important enough and it just made things complicated for other people so… that’s why I want to choose her.”    
  
Even a light as small and insignificant as hers that went out in the blink of an eye had been seen by Koori Ui. To him, she was not invisible. He would not let her story end in such an unsatisfactory way, she was born to suffer and die and then everyone forgot about her. Even if she was born to die early, she had met him, they were happy together, even if she belonged to the Washuu the entire time, Hairu had tried to live in her own way, she still smiled in such a sad and pathetic life.    
  
Then suddenly, the shape of the woman he was talking about appeared in front of him. Ui stopped, unable to react his body becoming incredibly weak from the mere sight of her.   
  
Hairu’s smile was as empty as ever. “You’ve got to come back Hajime. They’re going to scold you for running away so often.” 

  
Hajime tried to draw out his kagune, but Hairu was faster. She grabbed him by the face and forced him against the ground, twisting his neck and his arms. 

 

‘Hairu, he’s just a kid.”   
  
He was almost twenty years old now, but he still felt like a kid to Ui. Ui wanted to treat him as a kid because nobody else had ever since his parents died.    
  
“...”   
  
“Hairu, stop being a stubborn brat and come with us. Tell us about the garden.”   
  


“... I don’t want you to think about me being from that place, Koori-senpai. The time I spent around you, it was the only time I felt normal. You looked at me like I was just some ditzy, pink haired girl without a care in the world, but because of that you treated me exactly the same way you treated everybody else.”   
  
“...Hairu.”   
  
“That was the only normal relationship I had. I knew that if you knew the truth about me, you’d never treat me this way. I’d be forever tainted in your view.  I knew that I didn’t deserve to be treated like a normal girl by you too, that I was lying to you to take advantage of your kindness. For some reason lying to everybody else at work never bothered me, but it hurt when I had to do it to you. It hurt… It hurt… It hurt ever so slightly.”    
  
“Hairu, stop it you’re not the one at fault. If they see what the Washuu did to you nobody will blame you.” 

 

“Shut up! It’s ruined! Ruined! Ruined! Stop saying it like it’s so easy. All I had to live for was my job at the CCG, that charade of being normal, and Arima’s praise and all of them are gone! It’s easy for you to say I can start again, you were born a person. I don’t have a family registry or anything! There’s not even any documents proving I was even born! How can I just go out into the world like that.” 

“If you want to be a legal citizen then just marry me, change your name to Ui and sever your ties with the Washuu.”   
  
Ui blurted it all out so suddenly, that he was in disbelief that his voice had even said those things. 

  
Hairu’s face turned as pink as a cherry blossom for a moment, her skin matched her hair, her entire face was that color and she had been ready to shout some other denial at Ui but the words got caught in her throat and suddenly she could not breathe.   
  
Hairu felt like she might suffocate in that moment, which seemed to go on forever without punctuation. For some reason though, being told what she had always wanted to hear, that there was a place even for her in this world was all the more agonizing for her. Furuta’s words echoed in her ears. Even if Arima had praised her, she would have kept killing, his praise would have fallen on deaf ears. She was simply unfixable, and was she going to burden the kind Koori with her unfixable self simply for the sake of the love she so desperately wanted. Love that would fail to fill in a single crack in her.    
  
Living without love, even dying without love, getting impaled by a coiled kagune that tore through her stomach and rearranged her organs, having to stand even after that when her body was screaming out to her that she might die, trying to speak when her lungs were shaking from the shock, and feeling fingers tear harshly through her neck until her head rolled off, all of those pains were less painful by far then the pain Koori’s love was inflicting on her.    
  
Because of the moment, she realized she wanted it, she also knew she did not deserve it. Eurydice must have disappeared when Orpheus looked back at her because she saw the look of love and longing in his eyes and realized she was nothing more than a cold corpse who could never return one-tenth of those emotions.    
  
She clapped her hands over her ears. “N-nooo, I can’t… Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, be quiet.” Then, just because she wanted him to stop talking, to stop whispering kind things to her, she grabbed Ui by the head and slammed him into the wall.    
  
She did not even check if he was okay, she immediately went to dragging Hajime back to the TSC, trying to forget what it was she just heard.    
  


 

💀

 

Ui woke up on the black and white tiled floor of Uta’s shop, his eyes peeling slowly awake with an ache in his head.    
  
“When’s the last time you washed this floor.”    
  
Uta frowned again. “You know for someone who constantly talks about manners, you’re pretty rude.”   
  
Ui  picked himself off the floor. He realized Uta’s help probably began and ended at dragging him back here. “If I were to accuse you of being a hypocrite, you’d probably say it’s necessary for a clown to be a hypocrite because that’s what makes you self aware or whatever.”    
  
“Hey, don’t steal my lines.”    
  
Even with his work interrupted by Hairu, Ui was not going to stop. Even though he was desperate for a smoking break. Uta and him stopped at a ramen noodle booth in Shibuya that was owned by a friend of his and discussed details. Ui was afraid about looking rude by eating in front of a ghoul, but Uta did not seem to mind and even asked him questions about the taste and texture of human food. Ui found them difficult to ask due to the disease in his stomach. He also vomited the ramen noodles back up, and saw blood mixed in with his vomit. The stand owner was very considerate about it. This had been happening to Ui more and more lately, so he simply wiped his mouth and continued on.   
  
Him and Uta got on the train together. Every single time the train stopped and somebody sat on the third seat in their row next to Uta, Uta made conversation with them the entire way until they got off on their stop. Ui had been reading the newspaper but made little progress due to how much conversation Uta was able to draw out of total strangers. Even if they were humans he had nothing in common with, he was able to smile at them like he was truly listening to them and then get them to talk so much.    
  
It was a long train ride all the way out to the countryside, so Uta ended up meeting quite a few people. When they finally got off, Ui talked to him the first time since getting on the train.    
  
“You know you don’t really seem like the extrovert type.”   
  
“Why does everybody say that?” Uta asked in a voice so quiet it sounded like a hushed whisper but Ui had already figured out that was just what his normal speaking voice sounded like, genuinely confused.    
  
“I’m not sure how he’ll react to this, me bringing his old enemy to his doorstep.”    
  
“I doubt he’ll react at all,” Uta said.   
  
“Well, just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s not rude to say.”    
  
“If he did react though that would be interesting. That’s why I came along. We met once with Renji, and once at the Auction, I always felt like no face and Hirako were going to settle things a third time but it never happened.” Uta’s head sunk, his hair falling over the side of his face. “It was a little bit disappointing.” 

  
“Try not to look so eager to kill my friend if you want me to introduce you to him.” 

  
“You still call him your friend.” Uta tilted his head, even more off balanced. “You’re an odd one.” 

Ui suddenly felt like he was being called out by the king of fools himself. 

 

“I’m eager to see what will happen but, he probably won’t care.”   
  
“Take does care deep down. He always has even if he wears a poker face about it. He’s just mourning the losses of everybody the hardest.”    
  
“You wonder and wonder so much about what’s underneath that mask he wears, but what if the twist is there is no twist? What if there’s just nothing there, nothing but a mask.” 

 

Ui knew Uta was just messing with him. He had come here for kicks and nothing more, treating this like he was playing a roulette table where red and black were the full spectrum of human emotions he might put his chips on witnessing. He had nothing left to say and raised a hand to knock on the door. 

 

Take’s expressionless face appeared in the doorway. “Ui, if you drag me to go drinking with you every time you have a problem you’re just going to develop an addiction.” It was what seemed like a level headed advice until Uta appeared in the doorway right behind Ui. “Is he going drinking with us too?”    
  
Ui was hoping to see Take at least raise an eyebrow or something. There was no way he did not recognize the ghoul in front of him was no-face.    
  
“Take, why didn’t you take Yusa here with you six years ago into the countryside?”   
  
“...”   
  
“Well, I guess whatever your reason was back then I’m sure you had one. I know it’s hard for you to talk about these things but, Yusa needs you to do what’s hard for his sake.” Ui reached out and put his hand on Take’s shoulder, hoping to feel a little bit of warmth. “Listen, he’s been in that place for six years. He probably doesn’t think that he can get out on his own, but there’s a place in the outside world for him and it’s with you.’   
  
“...”   
  
“I know what you’re feeling like, I’m sure it’s not just Arima you miss. You miss all of zero squad, you’re hiding your pain from losing them but it’s okay, we’re still here, me, you, Yusa, even Kuramoto and Fura. We can all still be here together. It won’t be what it was before but it’s not nothing.”    
  
“...”    
  
“I’m sorry you had to kill a lot of people, you’re more perceptive and level headed than a lot of us. You were probably the first to realize that ghouls had feelings and emotions too but you didn’t speak up about it. You didn’t think it was your place. You couldn’t be strong enough back then to be anything other than an underling and that only made your guilt worse.”   
  
“...”   
  
“It’s okay if it was the wrong thing to follow Arima, if you only did the wrong things with zero squads after being entrusted with them by Arima if all you did was make mistakes that’s fine. Take, all I’ve done up until this point was the wrong thing too. You don’t have to suppress your emotions, it’s okay to feel what you’ve lost.”   
  
“...”    
  
“I’m still here. Even if you tell me that we weren’t really friends, I know my own feelings I had of the time were that of a friend. I’ll help you bear it together. You don’t need to be all alone in the countryside waiting to die.”   
  
“...”   
  
“There are still things you can do. Hirako, please, you’ve always been way more than you’ve given yourself credit for.”   
  
“...”   
  
“Come on, Hirako-senpai. For you, was everything in this world outside of Arima so worthless that you didn’t care at all? Your grandparents… You didn’t love those ordinary law-abiding citizens at all? Your squad you led with Kuramoto? Going drinking with me and Fura? Taking care of Yusa, Rikai and Shio? In your priorities list, was everything other than Arima all trash? Were you just putting up with them because Arima told you to?    
  
“...”   
  


“Hey, why is it Arima anyway? Why is Arima the only one to get special treatment? Is he your alter ego or something?”    
  
“What would you know, Ui. You don’t know anything about me.” Take finally spoke up. Whether Ui’s words had incensed him, or he had simply gotten bored listening to the other go on and on was completely indiscernible from his expression. He looked puzzled. If Take’s face was the expression of somebody staring at a puzzle in front of him, he also had the resignation that he was never even going to bother to try to fit such oddly shaped pieces together.    
  
“You’re right, I don’t know a damn thing. I’ve been with you all this time, but I don’t understand a single thing about you. Because only you know about you. So please, show me. If you explain it I’ll try to understand, if you want to stumble along trying to make things up to Yusa I’ll help you.”   
  
“What do you think I am, some father who walked out on him six years ago? I was only his squad leader, he has a new squad leader now, he wasn’t abandoned.”   
  
“You know that’s not true.”   
  
“He didn’t ask to come with me.”   
  
“Do you really think that kid knew how to ask? Do you think he even knew it was an option for him to leave that place?”    
  
At that moment Uta realized what Ui reminded him of. He looked like a peasant, prostrated before a statue clutching at its feet. He would wash the statue at the shrine of the gods, douse it in oil, bring it food offerings, he was that desperate, that desolate having lost everything to hold onto that he just wanted one tiny sign.    
  
Uta wondered how many times in human history, that poor, disillusioned and starving peasants had screamed at the gods. Gods that were capable of making a whole field of wheat bloom with a snap of their fingers. Everybody had different ways of thinking, this won’t work, and this is no good so let’s try this, which explained why there were millions of different gods in Japan.    
  
Despite the presence of so many gods, not a single one of them ever appeared before mortal eyes. No matter how many times they were begged, they never even so much as lifted a finger. It was only logical that gods were cruel, they had created this world after all. They created wheat, but they created drought and famine as well. They planted flowers, but the reason flowers wilted was because they made it that way. The world was fundamentally unfair.    
  
Yet, Ui had something that Uta did not have, and he had once seen in Renji. Even in the face of this world he was dying to connect, he still wanted to plant lotus seeds, to have them reach away from lily pads and reach so high they could almost touch the sun. Uta saw no point in those flowers growing so tall knowing they would eventually wilt. Chasing the sun was a fool’s game that not even a fool like him would participate in because no matter how close you got the end result would be the same, getting burnt. Yet, the nutrients to live were contained in the sun’s warmth. No matter how much he denied it, he was still a living thing. If he hid himself in the shadows he would grow cold and still. That was why, as much as he thought they were stupid for doing so, and only blinded by staring directly at the sun, he also envied them more than anyone else, because what they must have felt, as the flames licked, and gently caressed their whole bodies. He just wanted that feeling, if even or a moment, but he knew he was not strong even if everybody else told him he was, he would not survive the crash, the wax that held him together would melt and he would fall apart at the seams.    
  
He had seen others fall apart, again and again, and the strangest thing happened. Sometimes, they would stop kneel down and grope blindly around, searching for the pieces of themselves to try to put themselves back together.    
  
He wanted Reji to show him that. That he made more of his life than clinging to the memories of his sister, that he put the pieces back together. However Uta’s phone buzzed in his back pocket and he ignored it. More pictures of Renji’s niece. As long as he could find his sister in other people, Renji would not look at himself.    
  
It was too bad Uta thought. If Renji ever saw himself, perhaps he could see the beautiful man that Uta saw. What a silly emotion this was, wanting somebody to care about themselves, to see value in themselves, the way you saw it in them.    
  
Ui reminded him of that part of Renji. The part of Reji that saw how different they were, how they might never come to understand each other, and still offered him a hand anyway.    
  
That was also why he knew, that no matter how much Ui begged Take, that the stone statue in front of him was not going to suddenly have life breathed into it. Uta felt it was more likely a miracle would happen, or a god would appear, than it was that Take would show himself in front of Ui. 

 

“...Yusa said he was proud to carry the name of Arima. If Arima was still here, he could do something for him, but there’s nothing someone like me can do for him.”    
  
At that, Ui finally pushed him over. Take barely resisting falling down once more. Ui did not even waste his time yelling, he simply stormed off on the opposite direction leaving Uta alone with Take.    
  
Uta kneeled in front of Take on the ground. He did not even feel like changing his face, even though he thought he could get an interesting reaction by showing him Arima’s at this moment. “It’s interesting… because you’re just a human who was born and taken care of by his grandparents. I think it’s possible Arima’s harsh training and conditioning to kill could have made you this way.. But isn’t it weird that you ended up just like me?”    
  
“Just leave me alone.” 

 

“I’m sure everybody treats you like a serious, no-nonsense, clear-headed and reasonable kind of guy, but…”   
  
He lowered his head to whisper intimately into Hirako's ear.    
  
“You’d make a good clown.”  
  
Every comedy act needed a straight man.    
In fact some people could say that pretending to be level head in a world that was off level, pretending to be sane in a world gone mad was a kind of madness itself.   
If they were pretentious like Uta they would say that, anyway. 

  
Uta rushed to catch up with Ui, who was already staring crossly at him. “What’s wrong, aren’t you mad at your senpai?”   
  
“That doesn’t mean I wanted you to say those things to him.”    
  
“But it was funny. A scene needs to end on a good punch line.”   
  


“I was wondering what you found so funny.” 

Ui tilted his head. He had been confused all this time, about Uta’s honest engagement with everyone around him. It made no sense at all from someone who called himself a clown, who spent his life laughing, he could not see the parallels between him and Furuta but right at this moment it was like everything clicked for him and he said something that Uta who could tune others out, forget and lose people easily would never forget.    
  
“The joke for you is that other people try.”  
  
In response to that Uta merely smiled.   
The same smile might one give an opponent that made a particularly good move in a friendly game of chess. 

"If you figured all of that out you might be closer to thinking like me than you care to admit."


	11. Childhood's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusa and Hajime go on a Date  
> Yusa and Hajime's date scene is a reference to the date in Owarimonogatari between Hitagi and Senjyo.   
> Yusa and Hajime's fight scene is a nier automata reference, because the Oggai's masks were originally nier references.

“We’re going on a date!” 

 

Hajime asked him that out of the blue. The boy with messy hair and a face that was easy to forget asked him while standing at the foot of his bed. Yusa wondered if the boy who had been sneaking out to see him more and more had made some kind of stealthy infiltration into the chateau but then he saw that the window was broken in the corner and shards of glass were fallen onto the floor.    
  
All Yusa could think about at the moment was how he was going to have to clean that up later, like everything else in the chateau the eventually got passed to him. His section on the chore wheel was by far the largest slice of the pie.    
  
“How did you get in here…?”   
  
_ What’s this situation. _ _  
_ _ This is the kind of normal situation most teenagers live through. _ _  
_ _ I’ve been waiting for this all my life. _ _  
_ _ A normal first date.   _ _  
_ _ What’s up with this. I’m not thrilled at all. In fact it’s plain scary.  _

 

Yusa stared at Hajime through his bed head, white bangs having fallen over his eyes. None of his increasingly rapid train of thought heading for a collision even showed on his face, he just looked like a slightly stunned sheep. 

 

“Now then, we’re going on a date.” _  
_ _  
_ “Umm…”   
  
“No, that’s not right. That's not what I meant. Would you… Would you be so kind as to go on a date with me? Why don’ you… go on a date… with me? What is this? You don’t want to, Yusa?”   
  
“No, it’s not that I don’t want to it’s just… it’s three in the morning.”   
  
“I see. Then go on a date with me, Yusa.”   
  
“So, in the end you just went with an order?”

 

“Do you have any complaints, I mean questions?”   
  
“None, sir.” 

_  
_ Yusa decided to go along with it. The only time anybody asked him to see the city of tokyo was when Saiko wanted to go check on maman’s child and invited him along. He had been fighting for the sake of this city for six years, but he had never even gotten to wander around it and see it. He had never once gotten to live within this city. The fact that he was going with Hajime did not even occur to him until after he had gotten out of bed.    
  
“How are you… everywhere.” Yusa asked finally as he sat at the foot of his bed.    
  
“Well, I’m a rat you know. Even if one individual rat is unsightly and weak, they can crawl into any nook and cranny and the sheer number of them can spread out to the entire city. It doesn’t matter if a rat is insignificant, unloved or not it’ll still survive-’   
  
“Yeah, yeah, I meant why do you keep showing up to bother me of all people?” Yusa cut off his ranting by shoving a hand into Hajime’s face. “You’re done with Shio and Rikai so there’s nothing you should want out of me anymore.”    
  
Hajime paused for a moment, tilting his head to the side. “You’re the only one, Yusa, you’re the only living person who knows I’m alive.” 

 

_ In other words he’s just bothering me because he’s lonely.  _ Yusa could think of better reasons but at the same time he found it a little admirable. Hajime was such a brat the moment he wanted something he made all kinds of noise, snuck around, and threw tantrums until he got it. Yusa was far too quiet and too concerned with how others felt, he was lonely for so long but never once even thought of crying out for help as desperately as Hajime did. Even if he opened his mouth to call out to others not to leave him, nothing would come out at all. Perhaps he saw no reason others should stick around in the first place, when he had nothing to give them.    
  
Then there was Hajime who shouted in his face exactly what he wanted, and planned to take it with his hands even if he had to rip it away from someone else. Hajime brushed his hair back behind his ears for once revealing those coal-black eyes. “Get your beauty sleep and then in the morning skip work for the day and when you’re done with your preparations meet me outside your house.”    
  
And that was how, twenty one years old well past his adolescence Arima Yusa skipped work for the first time in his life, and decided to go on a date. It was a tough choice between spending a day in the sewers fighting, or spending a day in Tokyo with Hajime, but eventually he decided on Hajime. His first date. It would go down as a day to remember for him, or so he thought. 

  
Arima Yusa.    
Distant relative to Arima Kishou.    
Extremely intelligent, quiet and thoughtful seeming, and just like his relative his soft spoken nature hides how calculating he is.   
All that come from the garden are trained liars. He was taught to kill before anything else.    
He’s kept all his cards close to his chest since he was a young child. Always on guard.    
But when it comes to romance his combat level is zero. Absolutely zero.

💀

 

Their method of transportation was Hajime’s bicycle. Hajime could not get a license because he was not old enough yet, and also he was legally dead, and Yusa was never legal citizen to begin with as he had no family registry and was born in an underground crossbreeding garden. Hajime forced him to wear a helmet and Yusa felt embarrassed because he knew Hajime was going to make fun of his hat hair the moment he took the helmet off.    
  
“Yahhhhhhhhhhooooooooooo!” 

Hajime yelled out while pedaling with all his excitement.    
Yusa gave a much softer, less expressive.   
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh…..”

 

When they stopped at a bicycle rack, Hajime quickly began explaining his plans. While Yusa struggled to get his helmet off. Hajime only laughed at Yusa’s hair being completely flattened to his head once, before he continued to ramble like normal.    
  
“I have plans for us all morning-oh haha you styling it up-but the afternoon is a surprise. We’ll go out to the city from here by train and spend the first half bowling. After a bit of team time we’ll go to Karaoke.”    
  
“Oh…”   
  
“Yusa,what's your high score in bowling?”   
  
“Well, I’m a novice at bowling altogether, I’ve never even played before.”    
  
“Got it. There will be a penalty for the loser.”   
  
“Don’t set up a penalty game when it comes to light I’m a novice.”   
  
“The loser must swear absolute obedience to the winner.”    
  
“That’s a really harsh penalty!” 

  
“But you’re used to following orders aren’t you YusaYusa?”    
  
“Now you’re just being mean.”    
  
The entire train ride there, Yusa wondered if this was really a date. His first date. Then was he being a good date? Should he just quietly follow around Hajime like this and let Hajime lead the whole time, or was he meant to take the lead and sweep Hajime off his feet. Did he want to do those things? Were those things you were supposed to do to enjoy the date? A normal date. A date that can happen between any two people on earth, a scene that had repeated countless times. He stared at Hajime’s hand, his long slender fingers curled around the seat of the train. In another life he could have been a pianist. If he had not been forced to fight, those hands would be soft and untouched like they ought to be. Was he meant to take that hand? Would that make the date more enjoyable? 

 

Yusa stared at his own hand. As far as he tried to remember back, he could not recall the last time he had held a man’s hand. No, there was one time. After Kaiko led him to Arima, Arima softly held out a hand and walked him to the rest of Zero Squad, telling him that it was okay to hold onto him for now but after today he would have to stand on his own from now on.    
  
Yusa stood up trying to avoid the dilemma of whether or not he should take the boy’s hand entirely. Hajime tilted his head, and then stood up as well. He probably just thought they were giving up their seats for someone who needed them. The two of them stood in the train car together, holding onto the upper railing until suddenly the train bumped. For a moment Yusa fell backwards and Hajime on instinct alone reached out to catch him. Their hands brushed against one another, and then immediately returned to their sides.    
  
He had done it without even meaning to. Yusa wondered if it was Hajime’s first time as well. Touching another person’s hand, he meant.    
  
A competition of strength against a ghoul was almost a certain lose, but as they arrived at the early morning to the bowling alley Yusa was pretty sure strength did not change the outcome of bowling that much unless Hajime was intending to shot put the ball down the alley. The alley was completely abandoned because of the early morning, and the man at the desk just thought they were college students who had no morning classes.    
  
How nice that would be Yusa thought. To live in a dorm away from home, to spend all day lounging around the university, he would even shove the food that tasted like soggy newspaper into his mouth if it meant that he could dine on campus with friends.    
  
Hajime’s ghoul nature did not matter much in bowling but, Hajime sure was competitive. He had a competitive streak in almost everything he did, that was why he seemed so insecure, constantly posturing and trying to look cool in conversation. Hajime even finished all of his bowls by striking a pose.    
  
It caused a gutter ball every single time, but he refused to stop doing it.   
  
In comparison Yusa bowled like a grandma. Slowly and quietly, he picked the ball up, he took a long time to aim being heckled the entire time and ignoring it, then with two hands swung the ball back between his legs and then forward. The ball kept rolling steadily and eventually knocked every single pin down.    
  
“Dammit…To think that Yuyu would actually lie to me. You’re not a novice at all.” 

  
Yusa told Hajime he would probably do better if he stopped trying so hard, but the other boy refused to listen. Yusa bowled a completely average game, not even cracking one hundred points but he still did better than Hajime who only managed to get a few spares.    
  
He exhausted himself trying to look cool.    
“Fine, I will admit defeat. You can order me to do anything. Even if it’s torture, I’ll endure it.”

_ Tone it down a little bit,  _ Yusa thought.    
  
“Just for reference if you won what kind of request were you going to make?”    
  
“I was going to make you get on your knees and beg of course.”   
  


_ Just dial it down a bit from eleven,  _ Yusa wanted to ask. Technically he could get any request he wanted granted, but by this point he realized Hajime had some kind of ulterior motive. He was only dragging him around town on a ‘normal date’ because he wanted to ask a favor of him, and for some reason the boy could not outright say it.    
  
Yusa considered just asking him what he wanted but that seemed too difficult to do. He was not used to asking people for things in general, only being quiet. “Umm… a penalty like hold my hand all the way until we get to karaoke.”   
  
“You really are a cruel one, Yusa.”    
  
“How is that crueler than what you were planning!”    
  
That was how Yusa held hands for the first time, but the person he was holding hands with, was a small gremlin, with messy hair, and sweaty hands, that he was absolutely under any circumstances never going to feed after midnight. 

 

The next thing he knew the two of them were taking a break at a cafe. He had memories of Karaoke but his ears were still echoing from the high pitched screams Hajime gave off when he tried way too hard again to beat Yusa. It was the same cafe they had come to talk to in secret before. The cafe that was across the street from the cafe Maman’s wife ran. 

  
“Are you enjoying your tea?”   
  
“It’s hot.” It did not taste like anything to Yusa so he barely gave an answer. “Wait, can ghouls drink tea.”    
  
“There’s no way we can.”   
  
“But, it’s just boiled leaf juice it’s not like it’s meat or anything.”   
  
“It still comes from a plant.”    
  
“Well yeah but coffee comes from a plant. Did that ever get explained?” As Yusa asked it his question was ignored. 

 

“We should go to an arcade next and whoever gets the most tickets the other has to do a penalty-”    
  
“Stop playing games.”   
  
“But… what else are we supposed to do at an arcade?”   
  
“I mean, just tell me what it is you want. You… helped me find Shio and Rikai again in a weird way, so I… want to help you too.”  

 

The two of them saw a girl wander outside of the cafe. Her hair was a messy mop of white, that looked like it had black ink spilled on top of it. Yusa touched his hair for a moment. He wondered if his own hair was ever going to return to that color again.    
  
Yusa’s eyes trailed away from himself and looked back to Hajime. He was staring at the little girl… what was her name, Saiko only ever called her maman’s daughter. Ichi… Ichi… Ichigo Kurosaki or something. Normally Hajime had that kind of look on his face where he assumed the whole world revolved around him so naturally he did not notice anyone else. 

  
It was strange to see him turn to watch someone so closely, even staring with intent. “Yusa… do you want to help me? Call that little girl over here. You’re one of Kaneki’s friends, right?” 

 

Yusa’s experience was zero when it came to romance, however he was quite experienced with deception. He realized in an instant that Hajime had no intention of spending a normal day on the town. Everything up until this point, even scoping out this cafe weeks in advance was probably all for this purpose. 

  
The little girl grabbed an apple from a store container out back and held it up to her mouth flashing a smile. She bit into the apple looking really happy. If Yusa ate the apple, it would just taste like mush to him the same way everything else did even if his body would break it down for nutrients. Hajime could no longer eat apples anymore at all. It was like that old myth, once you descend into the underworld and eat the fruit, you can no longer eat the fruit of the living.    
  
He knew Hajime’s intentions the moment he saw his eyes watching. He pretended to hold a devil may care attitude about his fate, but all along he had been holding those feelings deep within himself. “No… Let’s just forget we were here.” 

 

He took the other boy by the hand and dragged him away from the table, Yusa had no idea what their bill was so he just took all the coins from his wallet and left them in a large pile. Hajime seemed quiet, it was the longest stretch of time Yusa ever heard him be quiet as long as he had known him.    
  
Then suddenly when they were in the alleyway about a block away, Hajime let go of Yusa’s hand. He turned around to check on the condition of the other boy, only to see him raise his foot and suddenly slam it into Yusa’s side. Yusa was kicked and skipped, and rolled across the concrete before colliding with a picket fence that fenced of the alleyway to a construction area.    
  
“Forget. Do you really think I can forget?”    
  


‘Hazuki-kun…”    
  
“Do you know what kept me alive when my parents died? Revenge? But I was stupid back then, I wanted revenge against every single ghoul in the world. Do you have any idea what I’ve been doing all this time? Sneaking away, getting into contact with Furuta, doing errands for Shio and Rikai, do you think I did all of that on a whim?”

  
Yusa was beginning to put it together now. He could tell from the way Hajime was trembling. He was seething with jealousy. He had made this speech over and over again to Yusa, how the world was divided into the have and the have nots. The person who killed him Kaneki Ken was living happily with a wife and a child, exactly the way Hajime might have been living with his two parents if a random act of cruelty had never interrupted their lives. Not only that but even after coming back from the dead, Hajime had realized that not a single person had mourned his death, there was not a place for him in this world.   
  
He tried to find a reason in that. The reason he came to was love. The difference between him and Kaneki Ken, had been a difference of who was loved and who was not. The person who killed him was loved by many, and Hajime the victim was forgotten about so easily because he had no one left after his parents. 

  
All Hajime wanted was to live like that little girl, happily munching around on apples and playing around her house without a care in the world. He wanted to be cared for, to live without fear, to return to that time of innocence before his parents were killed and he saw them buried in empty caskets because there was nothing left of their torn apart bodies to bury. 

  
“You know they say your face is a combination of your mother and father’s.” He slicked his hair back once again, so no part of his face was obscured anymore. Hajime was wearing a different face from the last time Yusa had saw him. “I’ve forgotten by now, what my mom and dad’s faces looked like. I forgot their voices, what it was like to be held by them. I’ve even forgotten my own face. But I won’t forget what was done to me.” 

 

No matter what external changes he made to the world though, no matter how much of it he broke around him, he would never return to that house with his parents. Because that house had been broken as well. The thing he truly wanted in his heart was impossible to begin with.    
  
It was like there was an empty part of him, continually leaking out like a hole in his chest and no matter who he told around him, everybody would tell him to ignore it and just keep going. Everybody else had hearts so they could keep living easily, and that was why they told those without, not even understanding what it was they were lacking in so many components of a basic human being that they should just keep on living to.   
  
Yusa could understand, because the reason he avoided going to visit that girl with Saiko is if he saw her happily holding the hand of her father, all he would think about were the times he dreamed of being taken out to the countryside with Take, spending the afternoons rolling around with his two shiba inus on the floor, getting books and studying so he could attend high school, bringing friends home and introducing them to his old man. He could spend a few years being spoiled by his grandparents, and then when they passed on, he would try to be strong and hold Take’s hand because he knew Take would never show any kind of weakness. Yusa still felt regret that he had cried over Arima’s body, and left Take alone right there even though Take must have been hurting just as much at that time.    
  
He could understand at least. Jealousy was an unpleasant emotion. Almost no one ever acknowledged it, and no good could ever come from it. Yet at the same time, to Yusa it struck him as a lonely emotion for those reasons. Even if he could understand, Yusa forced himself back to his feet.    
  
“You said kids fighting kids was bad, you said you didn’t pick on things weaker than you… when you said those things I started to like you a little bit.”    
  
Yusa stood up once more, reaching for the cloth bag he had been carrying around his shoulder all this time. He had brought a quinque with him every single time he went to meet Hajime, but only just now did he realize somewhere along the way he started to wish that he would never have to use it again. He leveled the quinque at Hajime, holding it parallel to the horizon.   
  
As they stood up opposite to each other in the empty construction site, Hajime reached behind his back as he made two red tendrils appear. He dug his hand into the red meat of his kagune and drew out a katana similar in length made of pure kagune matter, it sharpened into a shape glowing crimson and as red as metal.    
  
“If you want to protect her, be strong and kill the monster in front of you. That’s how these things go.”    
  
“Hajime, I don’t want this…”    
  
“A sword fight I’ve always wanted this! Come on Yusa, defeat the evil in front of you so you can go back to playing house.” 

 

Hajime’s smile appeared on his face, his teeth perfectly structured and dazzlingly white as always no matter how much blood red meat he ate. In an instant he disappeared and the last thing Yusa could see of his afterimage was his smile, before Hajime appeared in front of him slamming his katana down with everything he had.    
  
“It’s not fair to her!” Yusa cried out as he struggled hard with the quinque in his hands crossed against Hajime’s, “She’s just a kid.”    
  
Hajime took a step forward in their standoff and suddenly a pitch black kagune grew behind his black, in what looked to be black sludge bubbling up from behind him several eyeballs opened.  “It’s not fair to me! I thought I wanted to grow big and strong but all that time, all I wanted was to go back to being a normal kid and I got killed. I was a crying, screaming child and I got my face torn off.” As he finished screaming his kagune erupted forward from his back rushing at Yusa 

 

“If you do something to her there’s no way you’re escaping alive. You’ll die for real this time.” Yusa kept talking. He could not remember the last time he had talked so much, he was usually dead silent in the middle of a fight pushing everything down. The kagune split down the middle of his sword where he guarded but then rushed him from either side. Hajime spun him around in the air for a moment, before trying to throw him like a toy.    
  
In midair Yusa grabbed onto his sword again and slide through the portion of kagune that was wrapped around his side freeing himself. When he landed on his feet and brought his sword down again in a wide arc, Hajime had already dodged him by leaping into the air.    
  
Yusa followed Hajime, swinging his katana around wildly but Hajime dodged every time laughing the whole way.    
  
“Ha ha ha…. Ha ha aha ha! So what? None of it matters. The Oggai. Mayuzumi. Me. Even you. Sacrificial lambs all of us. Isn’t that HILARIOUS? Doesn’t that we make you laugh.”    
  
“Hazuki-kun. We-” Hazuki’s kagune emerged from the ground suddenly and wrapped along Yusa once more. Rather than fing him this time, Hajime’s kagune simply brought him closer so Hajime could scream in his face.    
  


“Shut up! You know I’m right. All of my friends on the oggai were killed, I heard them screaming out for their mother’s and fathers, desperately begging as he ate them! They were all killed for that one brat! One hundred kids dead so one kid can live a happy and smiling life! It was the same for you, Shio and RIkai died protecting that brat! Tell me it was worth it, say to my face it was worth having all of my friends die just so that perfect baby could be born and go live her perfect little life.”    
  
“Nobody in their right mind would say that.” Yusa struggled until one of his shoulders popped out of its joints. That freed him just enough to grab onto the quinque and activate its glowing red blade once more to free himself from the hold.    
  
“Shut up… Shut up! It doesn’t matter! None of this matters. It’s just because she’s loved that she’s so happy.  Love is so... Selfish, and terrible, I already knew there was none left for me when my parents died, so why do I want it so badly?” 

 

Hajime did not even seem to be paying attention anymore, Yusa rushed forward aiming right for the eye like Arima always taught him too, only hesitating at the last moment when he heard Hajime ask that question.    
  
Yusa had no answer to that. He could not bring himself to swing his sword one centimeter further, and so the tip of the red blade stopped just at Hajime’s eye. 

 

He was a terrible child too. Sadistic, treating everything like a game, violent, not blinking at death, reacting to trauma with a sick smile, arrogant, cruel, lying, deceiving  and most of all unfriendly. He tried to act like the absolute worst of himself.    
  
He acted unlovable. He wanted to be a human being so miserable in his personality that no one in the world could sympathize with him. He actively wanted to destroy the concept of his own humanity. He never wanted to be vulnerable again. He wanted to rip off his human face and become truly faceless, someone who could never be read by others. 

 

He hoped killing himself in that way would kill off his own longing. No matter how much he pushed it down, like he had put his hands around the neck of thirteen year old Hajime, pushed him into a pool of clean water and then pushed him under the surface to drown him pushing harder and harder no matter how much he struggled.    
  
No matter how unlovable he acted, he could not stop wanting to be loved. No matter how much he tried to destroy his own innocence, to murder the child he had once been he could not stop longing to return to that state of being.    
  
What he desired was impossible so he tried to kill desire itself, but that was no longer working. He was sick, sick of it all, sick of living when had died a long time ago. If only he had really died right then, he would be with his parents, that was the only place he had ever truly belonged even if returning there meant lying inside of his parents coffins, and trying to fall asleep there.    
  
“It’s just… how we were born. Everyone whose born wants that… even if you’re born entirely wrong, even if you come from the garden, you can’t help wanting that…” Yusa said as he slowly tried to lower his sword.    
  
Before he could finish the motion, Hajime’s kagune reached out and crushed it. With one hand he clawed at his own face, and the other he remembered he wa still holding his play katana. He brought it just up to his neck, to finish what Yusa refused to do.  “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! We should just destroy it! If nothing can make us better than we should just destroy it!”    
  
“No, you’re wrong. Killing another child won’t make you feel any better, even if it makes you forget for a little while you’ll still have nothing when you come back down from your high.”    
  
“There was nothing to begin with-”    
  
“There is!” Yusa had jumped ont Hajime to grab him, locking his arms around his neck. It was nothing like an embrace, in fact he could break the other boy if he was not too careful ghoul or not. That was why even if it meant putting himself in danger he softened his grip on the boy and let his arms come apart until Hajime fell on top of him. “There’s still something, there’s the two of us. We can be better than what the world did to us. Hajime, if you can’t help but want love then fall for me.”   
  
“What?”   
  
“If you want to be loved then just fall for me! Who knows maybe one day I’ll love you in return, but I don’t want to love somebody that would hurt another kid like that.” 

  
Hajime back arched, his whole body convulsed suddenly as his kagune started to bubble from the area at the his lower back where it came out. He threw his head back and screamed out in agony. Whatever mental turmoil he was going through seemed to be linked directly to his kagune. It was overheating to the point that Hajime’s face turned red and with the bubbling red liquid falling out of his back it looked like his own blood was boiling.    
  
Then he rocked forward again and grabbed at his head and started to tear out his own face. He let out a scream that chilled Yusa’s blood, even though Yusa had spent his entire life hearing the muffled screams of ghouls, and dragon orphans gave out as their final note. Hajime was filled with incoherent emotions that he would never make sense of, contradictions that he would never resolve, and the feeling that all of his current conflict was utterly meaningless. That no one cared if he resented, hated others, or even if he felt guilty for what he had done, because no one even remembered who he was in the first place.    
  
He screamed - so loud, as if he wanted to be loud enough for the whole world to hear. He scraped at his face, his nails digging at the flesh as if he was trying to peel it off and remember who it was that faced belonged to. Then suddenly from his boiling back, one great spike of kagune formation shot out, only to dissolve the next moment, another kagune formed, only to dissolve, flowers bloomed only to break away into petals again and again. His kagune was breaking and reforming too much.    
  
It all came gushing out, like a spray of kagune fluid and blood. He stopped giving it shape anymore. That was what Yusa had been imagining before. Living while bleeding out continuously, trying to live with a large gaping hole inside you. 

  
“It’s not enough… I… I’m not enough... “

 

“You are enough.”    
  
Yusa forced himself up one more, and wrapped his arms around Hajime trying to wrench him away from his own self destruction. Blood splashed on Yusa’s face staining his hair, and his body creaked with the effort but finally he forced Hajime down and the gushing stop. His throat cracked, and went dry, and he coughed violently but stopped screaming at least. 

  
Even though Yusa convinced him down from destruction, Hajime was silent. He looked like a porcelain doll that had been shattered. He could barely stand up on his own, so Yusa offered him his back. Hajime crossed his arms and interlocked them just below his neck.   
  
“You’re taking responsibility for me, you know…” Hajime murmured in a weak voice.    
  
“I know.”    
  
“You’re compelled to obey… absolute obedience, for the rest of your life.”   
  
“Sure, sure.”    
  
Yusa carried the other boy, listening to the directions that Hajime gave him by murmuring in his ear on his back the entire way, until he reached the barracks where Shio and Rikai were. Hajime’s usually loud and boisterous presence was so weak, all he could do was keep clinging to Yusa’s back the entire time. It reminded Yusa that he was still a child after all.

 

💀

 

Rikai groaned in annoyance at having to take care of the sleeping Hajime. Unlike Shio who seemed too stupid to hold a grudge and simply forgot whatever had been done to him, she could not forgive the other boy so easily. She could care less about somebody killing her, but killing Shio was something else entirely.    
  
She might have tried to get back at him, if Yusa was not right next to her sitting at his bedside. It was a strange, almost absurd set of circumstances that led to this but the former members of zero squad and the oggai that had once fought to the death now were finally reunited like this. 

It was Shio who could not read the mood of the room and was currently throwing a fuss due to not getting enough attention. He really was like a cat, the moment someone took their eyes off of him, he started to mewl, meow and even would scream if he did not receive enough in time. 

 

“Hey, how come Yusa got to go on a date and we never get to do anything?” Shio asked, kicking his foot at the air.    
  
“Because we’re legally dead, there’s no place for us to go out there.  We’re not supposed to leave here unsupervised. It’s against the rules.”    
  
“Hajime breaks the rules all the time.”    
  
“Well you’re not as smart as Hajime is. You’re so irresponsible your head would fall off-”   
  
“My head already has fallen off!”    
  
“See, exactly you’re proving my point.” Rikai’s eyes were as dead of any expression as usual, but inside, even though it refused to show on her face, just the reminder that Shio had once died was a sharp pain that pricked her.    
  
Shio crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. He sunk further and further into his dejected mood until his butt hit the floor. Yusa looked back to Shio, and then to Rikai who seemed to be desperately pretending not to look at Shio.    
  
He wondered what was going on between his two friends. Even a long time ago, he got the feeling that between the three of them Rikai and Shio were the closest. Their personalities were so opposite it had the odd effect of drawing them closer to each other. It was always Rikai who lectured Shio when he spoke without reading the room first.    
  
Yet those feelings had only festered and deepened for six years without even making any progress at all. If the living were stagnating after six years, then the dead would stagnate even worse, after all what could a dead body do but rot?    
  
Rikai reminded him of Hajime in that moment, the same but different. Hajime was desperately afraid that there was no love for him in the world, Rikai seemed rather indifferent to the world and there was someone in love with her, and that was exactly what she was afraid of. Yusa could understand at least, because he thought there was little good about himself. All of the garden must feel that way, the deformed products that they were. 

 

If someone could love them then how had they been living up until this point? Denying themselves everything, sunshine, water, even the most basic sustenance, what a wretched way they were living, what a fragile life. They had gotten used to living without love, without even the most basic things. 

 

It was a comfortable sort of misery, having nothing at all. It meant there was nothing to lose either, no value in yourself if you were lost. Love would change all of that, and to people who had gotten comfortable in their misery they were no longer afraid of being sad, being without, it was change that was the scariest thing.    
  
Yusa stood up then, letting go of the hand that was dangling off the side of Hajime’s bed. He looked to the pouting Shio, and the pretending to be ignoring them Rikai. Suddenly, he bowed and offered a hand in the air.    
  
“Do you two remember the night of the wedding?”    
  
There were marriages in the garden, but they were all arranged. Not a single one of the three were the product of two parents that loved each other. That was why, in all of them there was something lacking. They were nothing but the efforts of breeding. 

 

It was odd, seeing a wedding from love even if it was in the backdrop of a rebellion.   
  
Yusa had been hanging around Take’s side as usual. He was too nervous and wanted to hide behind the much taller man. Especially with Yomo going on a rampage like that. When Yusa looked back from behind Take though, he saw Shio and Rikai were sitting together.   
  
Perhaps in that moment he knew, what unrequited love really meant. Even before death, a love that belonged to someone else, never to be returned.    
  
“Why are you so quiet, Rikai?”   
  
“I’m thinking.”   
  
“Why are you doing that?”   
  
“Because unlike you I actually spend time thinking…no, it’s like you. I’m only thinking about nonsense. Do you know what happened to the Souzu branch?”   
  
“Hmm, I don’t really know about that kind of stuff.”   
  
“There were too many intermarriages, they had bad blood, it had become too dirty so V slaughtered them. It was like pruning a branch no loss. I got to live because I was considered a viable offspring, I was the only one. My story isn’t that different from yours or Yusa’s though, we were all off-grade.”    
  
They had to live even though they were never born to begin with, only produced.    
  


“Yeah, we were only born because we had a job to do for the Washuu. Oh, you know I just remembered, I was just thinking the other day if we do win then won’t we lose our jobs? The CCG will disband and we won’t guard haise or anything, right? So what do we do then?”    
  
“That’s true…” Rikai said in a quieter voice.    
  
“Welp, I guess I’ll eat a bunch of melon bread and all the other sweets I can find.” Shio was the one who had brought the troubling question up. They were born with their whole lives planned around him, if they were free to do anything, what would they do? Not a single one of them had lived even once. All they knew was the roles they were born into. However, as soon as he brought up the question, he also forgot about it, untroubled as usual. He stood up and started to stretch. “I’ll eat so many sweets that I won’t be able to do anything but lie around all day. Then I won’t have to worry about what my job is now. How about you?”   
  
“Me? I’ve never thought about it before.”   
  
“Really? Not even once? I thought I was supposed to be the stupid one.”    
  
“Watch yourself.”    
  
“Yusa always showed me all these cool magazines of the outside world. You didn’t look at them and think there was some place you wanted to go or something you wanted to try?”    
  
“Huh?”   
  
She thought she was lucky to be alive, the last member of the branch. She was lucky to have met Yusa and Shio. If she got to die as peacefully as Arima did, she would be three times more lucky than she ever deserved. She could not imagine anything more in her life. If shio was insisting though she would try. “Maybe… I want to grow some flowers, under the real sun this time.”   
  
“Flowers?”   
  
“It’d be nice… if the three of us could look at flowers again, without having to think about death. If we could find flowers beautiful on their own. Maybe, if I got good at growing, Yusa and you would forget about the flowers in the sunlit garden and only remember the ones I grew instead.”   
  
“Flowers… Huh.”    
  
Shio repeated again. Tsukiyama bumped into him, and several flowers fluttered off of his person. Shio picked one up off the ground, and put it in the other side of Rikai’s hair. Rikai’s face flustered for a moment, and then just to get back at him, she grabbed one of the flowers in her hair, and tucked it in between his curls.

Shio was not embarrassed at all. He thought he looked handsome. He flicked his light blue hair, and flashed a cat like smile. “Do you think this could ever happen to us?”   
  
“Huh?”   
  
“If the Washuu were no longer in this world, and if the CCG was gone, then could we get married to somebody just like those two.”   
  
“Anybody you asked would probably say no.”   
  
“Well if they said no I could always ask you.”   
  
“I-I-I’d definitely say no. Don’t make me sound like your second choice.”    
  
“Choice…”    
  
They were all three of them unchosen children. Shio’s attention drifted away as it always did, as he listened to the music similarly drifting into the air. A single note was just a noise, but when it came together with other notes it formed into a beautiful melody. A single flower could easily wilt on its own, but when it was together with others it became a beautiful garden.    
  
It was like things in this world were designed to connect, all the way down to the most basic building blocks, even the molecules were meant to be arranged and bond closely together.    
  
“Hey, do you hear that…?”    
  
His hand reached out and connected his hand to hers. Shio noticed all of these wonderful things about the sounds and music around him, and all the people but he always had the hardest time putting those many colorful emotions inside of him into words. He wished he could. If he could, then he would use it to give Rikai a reason to smile more.    
  
Both of his hands grasped Rikai’s tiny and frail one, like it was some fragile precious object, as he pulled and urged her to follow him. 

  
“That music… probably sounds better because I’m together with you.”   
  


He wanted to ask her to dance with him.    
  
“Dancing would be more fun… if you were…”    
  
Shio’s question never finished because suddenly a raging Yomo appeared between the two of them. Shio and Rikai had to flee to where Yusa was, watching them and and feeling distant from the two of them.   
  
Suddenly Take placed a hand on his shoulder.    
  
“Don’t become like that.”    
  
“Eh… Ye, yes okay…? ”Yusa whispered, slowly to himself. “But…it doesn’t seem so bad, being like that.” He was not looking at Take, but rather Shio and Rikai both with flowers in their hair  on the opposite sides of Take looking awkwardly away from each other.    
  
In the present Yusa this time instead of just watching feeling like he was off in some far away place, grabbed each of their hands and was the connecting bridge between the two of them. Even if it might disturb Hajime in his sleep or give him a headache he did not care as he had given Yusa plenty of headaches before.    
  


“Come on, let’s do it together this time.” He spun them around,  ring around the rosies, a pocket full of posies, and all that. There was no music at all in the cramped little room that passed for their bedrooms but the three of them could still fill it up with noise if they wanted to between them. If they were going to live like that, like flowers covering up the scent of death then they should get to bloom at least once Yusa thought.    
  
Shio adapted immediately, and laughed as Yusa spun him around. Rikai resisted with her usual coldness, until the sight of Shio’s wide open smile made her melt. Just as they started to circle around each other forgetting the world entirely, Yusa let go of both of their hands and let Rikai and Shio connect to each other.    
  
The two of them finally danced in the way they had wanted to on that wedding day. They forgot about the world for a moment.   
  
“Just rest your hand here… and the other here…” Shio instructed, his face reddening, “And step with me.”    
  
“Wait, I wasn’t ready!”    
  
Shio wrapped his arm around Rikai’s back, Rikai put a hand on his hip, and the two of them intertwined the fingers of their leading hands. He hooked a hand around her back and then pulled her forward with him.    
  
The entire time, when it stopped being about the three of them, Rikai was hesitant, unsure. Her face reddened and she showed emotion for the first time. “You’re going too fast.” 

 

“No, I’m not. Come on, we have to do it together.” This time when Shio stepped back, Rikai followed him perfectly. The two of them circled around each other, they danced like that again and again. They kept dancing until their awkwardness disappeared. In the curves of each other’s bodies, they forgot that they were half formed, malformed and unfit for anything in this world. Just for a moment as long as they kept dancing, together it was like they had no missing pieces at all.    
  
They danced like children among the flowers, like children playing in flowers ought to look like. They forgot about the true meaning of the flowers and simply thought they were pretty things, they were beautiful simply for the fact that they were together. When they stopped hearing the song playing, Rikai simply leaned her head against Shio’s chest finally. She let herself relax against him.    
  
“You’ve gotten so much taller since then.”   
  
“I know, I’m almost a whole head taller. Good thing I didn’t lose my head for good otherwise I’d be short.”   
  
“I never thought… we’d get to grow this much.” 

  
Yusa looked at the both of them, resting his hands one on each of their shoulders. “We deserve to grow up, and grow together… because… we were born you know.” All three of them were finally together for once. They leaned their heads on one another, each supporting the other’s weight. 

  
It was Rikai who finally opened her eyes. “Because we were made ghouls we’ll get to live a little bit longer without expiring early. Yusa… you’re right we should live.”   
  
“It’d be boring to get all that extra time and do nothing with it anyway.” Shio said, opening his eyes and smiling as well.    
  
Rikai however was serious. “No I mean, Yusa we were made into full ghouls by a dragon’s poison. That poison was made by a specific core… if only we could find another dragon core like that then you could drink the poison to.”   
  
“I… I don’t need it for now.” It was only his hair that went grey, his body still worked for the most part even if it ached. “But, Hsiao might. Will you two help me? We’re not the only ones left from the garden, we might be able to save Hsiao after all.”    
  
Shio and Rikai both nodded in agreement. How could they not? They were all born from the same place after all, they were all born incomplete like that, they were damaged the same way that Hajime was damaged and so because they were all so weak, human failures that were barely managing to do something as basic as live.    
  
That meant that should they help each other to live, all of them, all from the garden, and even other lost children like Hajime. There was no reason at all lost children should turn against each other, it felt so much better when they held onto each other.    
  
Yusa was sick of looking at death, he wanted to see them all live together. 


	12. As I Lay Dying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Scooby Gang breaks out of prison.

The moment Yusa entered the hospital room he could smell flowers. He had no good memories associated with the scent of flowers, its sweet scent only ever covered a sickness. Several nurses rushed by him pushing him out of the way and saying he had no visitation rights unless they were family.    
  
Technically, he must have been some distant cousin of Hsiao’s but Yusa would have a difficult time explaining that to the orderly. A faceless woman took him aside and tried to explain what was going on, but Yusa could not hear most of it. Suddenly the world was so loud. So loud it drowned out everything else. Words, words, words, words, words, were all that entered, echoed loudly around in his ears like they were smashing up his inner ear, and then exited. 

  
Yusa did as he always did and nodded quietly along. There had never been any place he could run away to, not even once in his life the bars of the cage around him so thick and the outside world so loud and unfamiliar that at times like this all he could do was run away inside of himself. 

 

That was probably why so many people had disappeared in front of him in the past. At the most important moments, the critical junctures he always froze up and went quiet. First his father, and then Arima, and then Shio and Rikai, and then Hirako, even if they left him did he even try to reach out a hand to make them stay. He saw their figures walking away from him for a moment and closed his eyes.    
  
When he opened his eyes he had been allowed to see Hsiao in her critical state by her request. Even with her condition plummeting, she gave him the same quiet smile as ever. “Yusa, don’t make such a weak face. You always look like a little lost sheep.”   
  
“Hsiao, you can’t go now. I’ve finally figured out a way to fix the aging problem for you and me. If we can find a sample of the poison from six years ago we’ll turn to full ghouls and the imbalances in our bodies will be fixed.”   
  
“That’s nice little Yusa.”   
  
“Are you listening?”    
  
“Be quiet for a moment. I can hear you. I’m trying to compose my thoughts for what work I have left to do at the chateau.”    
  
“Who cares about that place?”   
  
“Yusa.”   
  
“I’m sorry. We had six years, we knew this would happen when we got older but I let you get this way. Please, Hsiao just hold on a little longer and I can fix it. If we steal it we can-”

Her hand reached up for his face. Hsiao thought she might caress his cheeks again, but instead her finger reached up and touched on his lip. She was asking him to be quiet. To not cause trouble. That was all he had ever done to this point. Just like her, the two of them survived until now for the sake of the good garden children even if it meant while smiling and remaining quiet on the outside, as time passed their bodies rotted away from the inside.    
  
“We can’t defy the CCG. It’s fine, Yusa, even though I’m going to die you’ll still be alive. I’ve asked that kind doctor Kimi to autopsy my corpse so she can use it to help you.”   
  
“What… what are you talking about? You’re not going to die. I’m going to save you, Hsiao. I’ll take you away from this place-”   
  
“Just accept it, you wimp. You have to be strong and fight on your own from now on.” She opened her mouth to smile at him, and he saw blood dripping from the corner of her lips. Drip, drip, drip, those small droplets quickly became a stream. Yusa saw flowers, flowers blooming all around him and the pure white bletilla strietta’s he remembered from his home slowly were stained by the falling blood. Organ failure, internal bleeding, hemorrhaging, the words flashed in Yusa’s mind as something the faceless doctor had explained to him in a room that was far too white, glaringly white, but Yusa had forgotten it until now. “This was what was going to happen since I was born.”   
  
“Because you’re a garden child… you think you have to die just because you’re a garden child? I’ll fix it, there’s a cure, we can use the same cure that V used.”   
  
“We should just recklessly hurt others to live like them?”   
  
“We should live!” 

 

“Everything is born to die, Yusa. We’re no different from anything else. Now, at the chateau-”   
  
“No, stop it. You’re right, I’m a wimp, I’m soft, without you I can’t do anything.”   
  
“Don’t say that. You don’t need to rely on big sister anymore.”   
  
“Stay with me, there are still things you need to do.” 

  
“Things I need to do… That’s why… the chateau…Saiko. I want to see Saiko. No real reason, I just wanna see her now. It was almost like… I was learning to become a human when I went to that chateau. I even thought I could change.”    
  
She coughed again, the blood spilling on Yusa’s face. It did not matter much to him, even if the ends of his white hair turned red he was already a bloodstained flower.    
  
“Hsiao….”   
  
“But in the end, I… I can’t change. This is enough for me. Thank you for tending to my bedside all this time. I thought I would die in the middle of battle, being torn apart and eaten by ghouls, but I got to die in such a soft bed with someone I love.”    
  
“Didn’t you say you were going to go back to work? Didn’t you say you liked the chateau? They were all a family to you?”   
  
“Mm…I was born to mother and father, I met big sister Hairu, and I was given to the chateau.  Urie and Tooru are the ones that show us how to do our work, Saiko is the cute one, Touma doesn’t do much during missions but he helps out around the house, you’re the quiet and skilled swordsman, and Aura is the nice but unreadable guy. Ah, there’s Suzu and the newbie too. I got to meet all of them that’s enough for me.”   
  
“How is that enough? You were born, your mother didn’t love you because your father raped her, you were only raised to spend all of your life killing ghouls, and when you weren’t killed and eaten alive by ghouls that never needed to be hunted down in the first place, they just worked you to death instead. You act like you don’t deserve what everyone’s given you, but in the end they’ve given you nothing and you’re the one who got hurt the most.”

 

“I know.”   
  
Yusa had thought all this time Hsiao was in denial.    
  
“Every time mother touched me, she flinched in pain. I’m sure my suffering now isn’t anything compared to that.”

  
“Then what was the point of your life? You had the right to be happy! And yet you kept swallowing, and swallowing, and swallowing all these painful things, and now you’re lying here dying! Was your whole life just punishment for being born is that what you think this is? What the hell have you done so far? Are you stupid?”    
  
“Yusa… I’ve never seen you raise your voice so loud. I found a little bit of love in that chateau… what do you think I should have wanted? Should I have devoured everything greedily like little Furuta?”   
  
“You should want…” 

  
Everything.    
Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything.    
No matter how many times he repeated the words, however Hsiao stopped responding to him. 

 

“Yusa…? Why are you saying anything? Where did you go? I have important work I have to pass onto you. Talk to me… Say something… Is anyone there…? It’s so quiet… Ah, even this painless way of passing is more than I deserve. I’m not scared, but hold my hand please. Are you? I can’t tell. Listen, tell Aura to come back to the chateau more often and forget his grudge against ghouls, Mutsuki to make up with Urie, tell Higemaru he was never cut out to be an investigator, tell… who… for some reason… I can’t see their faces anymore… I… Mother… … they told me to get the quinque surgery and enter the chateau to spy on them for V they said they’d kill my mother if I didn’t… she… is she still alive…find her… and tell her that her daughter will no longer trouble her.”   
  
“Are you serious? Your mother didn’t give a damn about you, if she did she would have stopped you from becoming a child soldier! She wouldn’t give you up to the garden in the first place! I’m not going to track down that bitch if you want to do it yourself! Just live one more day, it doesn’t have to be forever just one more day… Hsiao?” 

 

Yusa had been screaming in her face to try to get her to listen to him. The entire time she only continued to mumble incoherently. Util suddenly even the quiet noises of her death cut off. Yusa remembered this scene before, Hsiao died quietly, and beautifully she looked like a princess in a coffin. Yusa had seen the scene in several Disney movies before. They were the only kind available in DVDs at the garden.    
  
Hsiao who had such a strong presence that threatened to burn everyone around her, suddenly flickered out just like that. She had been weaker than any other human all along, born with only a half life, thinking she was deserving of that, she pretended to be strong because she had to cover up for that fundamental weakness.    
  
Yet, despite living her whole life fighting, the sum total of all of that fighting was in front of him, and it was the frail girl clinging to that hospital bed. Yusa’s white hair fell in front of his face again. He reached up to touch his face because he had no idea what sort of emotion he was showing at the moment. He had no idea how to feel. Hsiao was much stronger than him, he had thought he was finally going to save her for all the times she had taken care of him.    
  
As he touched his face he felt wet tears falling down it. He had not cried once since Arima, he went seven years without crying, even when he knew what happened to Shio and Rikai. Perhaps because of how wrong this was to him. He knew Hsiao did not want to die, weakened by illness and accepting fate like this. Hsiao always told him, what she admired the most about Saiko was her sense of freedom. 

 

“You could have been free too, Hsiao, but not like this…” 

 

Sleeping beauty, Snow white, a perfectly preserved sleeping princess in a glass coffin that was what Hsiao had looked like. Old Ainu, aged silver, an elder passing on gently after tiring of this life, that was what Arima had looked like. They seemed so content and beautiful in death. 

 

If that was beauty Yusa wanted no part of it. 

Yusa wondered if it was a betrayal to Arima, that he finally understood Furuta’s feelings. After being told again and again to simply accept things as is and be happy that he was loved in the chateau, that desire had taken root in him. 

  
He wondered why garden children could even claim to be alive, not because they died early but because they willingly acted like puppets their entire life.    
  
The voice in his head split in two. One black and one white, a binary split, it was like two snakes were whispering into his ear, one with pure white scales and one with pitch black.    
_ No that’s wrong. _ __   
How is it wrong, boy?    
  


_ I’m… we’re… _   
  
He had a will after all. He had desires. It was only now pushed to the absolute edge he realized them. The desire flowed within him, it made him feel more alive than the chilled blood coursing through his veins slowly ever had, or the heart beating at half tempo.    
  
Hatred.   
_ You’re wrong. _ _   
_ Venom flowed through his veins warming them more than his blood ever did.   
_ You’re wrong.  _   
The more he had tried to be pure white, the more a pitch black ink had leaked from his heart. The more he tried to hide in the light of the TSC, the deeper the shadow grew behind him.    
__ Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

He hated the chateau.   
He hated killing.   
He hated the CCG.   
He hated ghouls and humans.    
It’s impossible you can’t help but desiring something, just being born in this world you think you deserve a place in it. Some seek beauty, some seek love and connection, and yet he found hatred.

_ I’m not like that.  _

 

He did not trust anything.    
He wanted to destroy everything.   
He lost hope in everything.   
He wanted to obtain everything.   
He wanted to be loved by all.    
He finally understood why Furuta did what he did. He killed all of it, every last ghoul, every last human too, they were all standing in his way.    
Because they had all decided from the moment he was born he was not allowed to live. 

He wanted to live. He wanted to live. He wanted to live. He wanted to live so badly, so desperately, so ugly, so misfit, so malformed, he wanted to live still. He did not want to die beautifully, he did not want to live a beautiful life, he wanted to grow old and ugly, until he was covered in wrinkles and scars.    
  
Arima, the pure white saint that had sacrificed himself nobly as a martyr.   
Furuta, the pitch black devil that had been slain by a hero.    
He loved Arima but hated Furuta.   
He hated Arima but loved Furuta.    
This world, this world, this world, was it the world that Arima wanted? He didn’t give a damn anymore. He was not going to fight for Arima’s wishes anymore, as beautiful as they were. He would no longer be selfless, he wanted to be selfish. He would only fight for the world he wanted. 

  
He wanted a world in which he could live.    
That was why he would even destroy the current one. 

He wanted a world where no one like him would be born ever again.    
Anything seemed doable for a goal like that.   
Was that the resolve Furuta had?    
He would become as wicked as Furuta for that sake but not now...   
  
He reached forward and took Hisao’s hand finally, and held it for a long time even thought she had already passed away. When a nurse nudged his shoulder and told him they would be losing soon, he asked for a few more minutes with her and lingered a little longer. 

 

💀

 

When Hajime found Yusa he was still crying, gripping the case of his quinque like it was the only thing his hands were ever meant to hold. Hajime woke up with a feeling like a two ton boulder had been dropped on his body, and that someone warm had been holding his hand while he slept. He was told he was dropped off by Yusa, and went to find him again.   
  
Hajime greeted him with a smile, and Yusa wiped at his eyes, the fat tears that fell from them smearing snot and fluid all over his face and tried to smile back. Hajime only started to worry when he saw his own smile appear on Yusa’s face. 

 

A smile that seemed to laugh out in spite at the whole world. Hajime thought Yusa was too kind and soft to ever carry such a smile. Whatever joke he was about to make was caught at the back of his throat, and Hajime approached the other boy quietly for once. 

 

Hajime leaned towards him, sucking in a breath between his perfect teeth, and held both of his arms out.    
  
Yusa collapsed on him, no it was more like Yusa wished to bury himself in Hajime. He picked flowers off of the ground, threw them aside, and then dug with his hands in the dirt and buried himself underneath the garden to escape from the light. Hajime had never realized how heavy another person was, until Yusa at that moment made him support all of his weight. He thought people were light like dolls, that was why their limbs tore away so easily and their heads popped off. Yusa is not as gentle to hold as he imagined too, his entire body convulses, it’s twitching with irritation and a barely held back violence. He thrashes against Hajime, and all Hajime can think of is a boy much younger laughing, and holding a severed head playing with it like a toy sitting in front of a pile of corpses as he tried to impress Furuta towering over all of them. All Hajime can do is tighter, tighter, hold onto him even if it means giving him rope burn around shoulders, his neck. He had the feeling that if he let go right now, Yusa might kill him, and then then everything in sight, so even if it was a painful embrace he does not mind holding him back.    
  
“It’s okay, keep struggling…”    
  
That painful struggle that rattled your skeleton like a cage, that was how you knew you were alive, because there was something knocking against the bars wanting desperately to come out. 

  
The first time he saw Yusa he thought he was a dull weakling, he thought it was too bad that the least interesting of the traitorous squad zero had been the only one to continue living. 

  
If Hajime was a rat, then Yusa was quiet like a mouse. He was cute, acceptable as a pet as long as he behaved, but if he died he would most likely be quickly forgotten. He lacked large fangs, nor claws, nor even a carnivorous hunger, and there were cases of rats eating mice. Hajime thought he would chew him around in his mouth a little bit, roll him under his tongue and spit him out. 

  
Even a quiet existence like Yusa had burned brighter with a will to live than anyone else, even if he only had half a life in the first place. Yusa had told him to fall for him, and Hajime decided to let himself fall. He admired that shitty brat who wanted to live. There was a quiet strength inside Yusa for surviving all this time, he had been waiting to show it to the world.   
  
Hajime got the sense that the world might never be the same once it was unleashed, or perhaps that was his romanticism talking, Yusa looked like he could destroy about anything right now, and Hajime was in love with that morbidity. 

  
“What’s wrong?”   
  
“Hsiao… she… she died that easily. I’m going to die soon too, and nobody in the chateau is even going to notice that I’m gone until their laundry piles up.”   
  
“We should just steal some of the poison. The core who made it Rize is still in Cochlea.”   
  
“If I steal from the TSC I’m never going to be able to go back.”   
  
“That’s fine then, come with me. We’ll just kill whoever gets in our way.”   
  
“That’s your solution to everything, you need to learn to be more tactical.”    
  
“Tactical?”   
  
“Yeah, have some tact.”   
  
“Tact?”   
  
“Don’t you know…” Yusa stopped shaking, and as he leaned back he pulled all his white hair back with one hand showing Hajime his face. Finally, a smile of his own. Yusa smiled just for Hajime to see. He wondered if anybody had shown him such a lovely smile, not since his parents had died. Showing him a face anybody could fall for, Yusa finished mocking him, “Killing people is rude.” 

 

Hajime dragged Yusa to where he agreed to meet Ui, if only because he had the sense that Yusa would not be able to walk there on his own. When he came face to face with Ui, Ui apologized again and again, but Yusa told him to skip it. Not because he forgave him but because they did not have the time. 

  
The two of them chasing opposite threads of the conspiracy for opposite reasons, quickly became conspirators in their final plan. Yusa’s testimony completed the list of testimonies that he had been collecting of survivors of the garden that Uta managed to string together for him.    
  
Yusa spoke about details he had never talked or shared once in his entire life, things that he wanted to forget the moment after he saw them. He felt like he might have spent his whole life being quiet, just so he could talk at this moment. Not just one butterfly but many flew out of his mouth. There were enough pairs of wings to blanket out all light from the sky, that was how many secrets he had been hiding. If he kept going he felt like he might just talk and talk and talk for the rest of the life. The garden was all words, words, words, now, words and symbols without any meaning to them. 

  
A lantern was turning in front of his eyes and he felt like he relieved his entire life over again, just as slow and half lived as the first time, like he was being dragged through his life with no free will at all on puppet strings, and yet this time talking about those memories and living them over again felt a little better.

  
He truly felt like Ui was listening to him.    
If there was someone to hear him, if there was someone connected to him, if there was someone writing his story down then maybe all that silent suffering was not as meaningless as he thought. He had lived as an invisible child for so long, this was the first time he ever felt seen.    
  
Yusa’s testimony was the final one, and they made contact with Ui’s reporter friend.    
The next morning the story was leaked.    
On purpose they did not leak it anonymously, both Koori Ui and Arima Yusa’s names were attached.    
  
Protests began at the CCG by the middle of the day the building was surrounded. That morning Koori Ui tendered his resignation, but instead Marude made good on his threats to contain him if he caused trouble with the story. He was greeted by Okahira and then arrested, and led away to interrogation.    
  
Urie Kuki called Yusa to meet in private. He told Yusa he was disappointed in him, and he knew there was trouble lately for how often he seemed to be avoiding work.He told Yusa that he needed to be careful, because if word got out then all of them would be treated like criminals after the fallout. Yusa accepted all of that silently as he was arrested and taken in for interrogation as well.    
  
The two of them both waited in separate interrogation rooms, but the investigators that were going to ask them about where they had found this information and who they were cooperating with never arrived. Nor did guards come.    
  
Because they had been taken out beforehand and their faces had been stolen. Ui held out his handcuffed hands above the table, as Hajime stepped into the room and quickly sent out a razor sharp kagune to sever the chain between the two cuffs, a definite sign that this was Hajime underneath the changed face, and disguised uniform as nobody else would be that extra.    
  
“Was it necessary for us to get arrested in order to sneak in here?” Ui complained. “They didn’t even let me smoke inside here. It’s an interrogation room for christ’s sake. Detectives get to smoke in them all the time.”   
  
“You’re not an investigator anymore, that’s probably why.” Uta answered in a dry voice appearing in the doorway.   
  
Hajime spoke up next to him, looking like a sidekick with how much shorter he was. “We can teach you, the same way he taught me to do this trick. I just need to rip your face off, Special Class.”    
  
“I wonder what secrets you’re hiding under that face…” Uta said in a quiet and thoughtful voice. 

“Enough you two, keep your teeth to yourself.” He straightened his tie and walked out of the room. Technically he was unnecessary to carrying out the next phase of the plan but Ui wanted to be there himself, even if it was a risk. He wanted to put his life on the line. He wondered if Furuta would be proud of him. 

 

“Alright then, if everything’s settled let’s go greet the king.” Uta said, changing his face back into that of the guard he had eaten and then adjusting his hat to conceal part of his face. 

 

💀

 

“You’re an idiot.’   
  
Furuta said, the moment he made eye contact with Ui dressed in a stolen guard’s uniform.    
  
“I told you to get Rize out of here, not me.” 

  
Ui took a step forward and swung at Furuta. Right in the eye he usually covered with his hair. Even though it felt like punching a brick wall, he put everything he had into it, enough to give him a black eye. 

 

Ui finally spoke up to his boss. “I don’t know the full story but, you were the one who saved her the most, and you were the one who hurt her the most too. That closeness is scary to you. Whatever. If you’re willing to get your organs torn out by that machine over and over again as some kind of atonement, then you can get through the pain of being a person for her sake too.”    
  
“What?”   
  
“She probably wants to see you suffer the most, right? Then you should do what will make you suffer more than anything. You should keep living, live out your miserable life and then die alone somewhere she can’t see you.” 

  
“You’re such an optimist, young hope Ui. Do you really think I’d be so impudent to think there was anything at all I could do to atone for what I did? Do you really think I can just show up there and save her again like no time passed between us at all?”

  
“You’re right it’s impudent. It’s irreverent. It’s not allowed. You’ll be breaking things again. It’s the wrong thing, but that’s what you know right? That’s always been the person you’ve been. So, my shitty baby of a boss, if you’ve lived that way until now keep on living.” 

  
Ui held out a hand.   
Furuta wondered if that was what he had really wanted when he laid his heart bare in front of Kaneki in that dingy pity. If he wanted the so-called compassionate associate special class to hold out a hand and insist that he made this mess, so he needed to come along to clean it up. That he was the one who damned her, so he needed to help save Rize.    
If he would have taken that hand in that moment, even if it came from him of all people.    
Instead, he was left alone to die in that dingy pit, and told that his way of living was the wrong one. It was less beautiful than Kaneki who lived for the sake of his connections to others, because he was unconnected, unrelated, because he had been forced to live without those things because every connection thread tied to his fingers would turn to strings meant to puppeteer him, Furuta had lived the wrong way all this time and was left alone at the end to die.    
All of his sins collapsed on his shoulders.    
The sky fell down and he was crushed.   
Not a single person wanted to bear the weight with him.    
  
He took Koori Ui’s hand, and Koori felt Furuta collapse against him. For someone who was emaciated to the point of likely long periods of starvation, his body felt especially heavy against Ui.

  
Furuta’s neck curled around Ui’s like that of a snake, he felt the smooth scales rubbing against his skin with Furuta’s every subtle movement. His voice was a soft hiss in Ui’s ear. “Do you think if you and I had both normal lives, and we had met, that we might have become friends?”   
  
Koori Ui averted his eyes.    
“There’s no way, because I hate your guts.”    
He needed to look away because it was almost impossible for Ui to lie while making eye contact.    
  
“Why don’t I get a touching scene of warm embrace like that?” Uta asked in the background.    
  
“It’s because you don’t have any friends.” Yusa commented.    
  
“I have one friend.”   
  
“Does he hug you like that?”    
  
“No, not really.”   
  
“He doesn’t sound like a good friend.”   
  
Uta pouted. He looked to Hajime on the other side of him. “Your friend is really mean, Hajime.” 

 

As the five of them now descended the stairs, Furuta changed into an extra guard uniform rather than the white prison robes he was wearing stretched out at the back of the group. “I don’t know what it is, but I just feel more me when I’m wearing black.” 

 

“The costume makes the clown.” Uta said, nodding behind him.   
  
Ui snapped back at both of them. “No you two just have terrible taste in clothing.” 

  
“Well, you guys have all done a good job so far but allow me to take control. I may be half dead and only half aware of what’s going on but half of a Furuta is worth the brain power of five normies.”   
  
“See this is why I hate you.” Ui grumbled.    
  
Uta pointed at himself, not really getting the point. “What about me? I’m not a normie. How many utas smart are you?” Uta seemed completely removed from the moment, and the fact that they were moving with some sense of urgency.    
  
Furuta flexed his fingers, before putting his thumb at the side of his nose. “I’m guessing you’re planning to escape through the tunnels, and reinforcements in the form of Shio and Rikai are waiting down there as well. The problem will be convincing Rize to go with us, she’s just as likely to cut and run and kill us all to leave behind as a distraction the moment she spots an opening. In that case there’s a friend in the lower levels I also saw getting harvested.”    
  
They were already on the SSS rank level. They only needed to descend down the spiral a little further, deeper and deeper into the underworld as they circled around it to reach what they wanted.    
  
Furuta gestured with a little bit more dramatic flair than his body could handle, because immediately afterwards he flinched and cried out in pain. “Tad-aaaah! Anyway, it’s a surprise left to us by my dearly departed Onii-chan.” 

 

In front of them there was a man floating in a tank. He was wearing the same white robes that Furuta was, but his shirt had been removed for whatever reason. His entire top half was muscular so thick it looked chiseled, his face was obscured by a prominent beard and shaggy hair. Furuta walked over to the tank and tapped on it with two fingers, “They should really have a do not tap sign on these things, oh but if there was a DNT sign I’d totally T it anyway.” He said as he continued to tap the glass.    
  
Then suddenly, those two sleeping eyes shot awake. Furuta gestured over to the console next to him. “We need to get them to stop pumping him full of RC Suppressors. That’s a terrible drug habit you’ve developed there, Shachi-san.”    
  
Shachi Kamishiro.    
Yusa recognized him right away, the last mission Zero Squad had been deployed on before Cochlea. When they finished him, Arima ordered everyone else to return ahead of time as he wanted to deliver the final blow in private and meet with V. 

 

“You spared him, thank you Arima-san.”    
  
Yusa said, a quiet prayer leaving his mouth. He knew it was a struggle for Arima, so he wanted to appreciate, what little he was able to do. Even saving only one or two butterflies was not nothing.    
  


Koori had little time for Furuta’s theatrics as the alarm could go off any moment now. He rushed towards the console and reached a hand for it-   
Then the strangest thing happened.   
He never made contact with the keyboard.   
He saw his own arm move away from it, even though hat was not what he told it to do.   
His arm sailed away slowly, and it took Ui a moment to figure out why his arm was falling away from him.    
  
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

He grabbed the stump of his shoulder, and cried out.    
Half of his vision went red, and he had to turn his head around to see the culprit, Suzuya Juuzou’s scythe had cut slickly through him removing his arm from the rest of his body in one swing.    
  
The alarm had not even gone off yet.    
There was no reason Juuzou should be here. Then Ui saw a color far worse than red, he saw pink. He suddenly realized who might have tipped them off, about Ui’s intentions towards Hajime, Shio, Rikai and Furuta.    
  
“Hairu, you idiot. What are you doing, cutting off the hand that’s trying to save you.”   
  
“You’re the stupid one, Koori-sensei.”   
  
Hairu’s eyes were pitch black.    
  
“I already told you I don’t want to be saved.” 


	13. The Stranger

By the time Juuzou hand swung his scythe down another time, Yusa moved to get in the way blocking it with his katana quinque. Blood red metal scraped against blood red metal, the sound of metal screaming shook Ui’s ears, loud enough to wake anyone up it shattered through his shock and brought him back to reality.   
  
“Yusa, don’t do this. You’re not supposed to fight anymore.” Ui said gripping the torn up sleeve where his arm used to be in a useless attempt to stop the bleeding. “Let’s just surrender.”

  
“Koori-senpai, where’s your pride as a member of zero squad? Are you going to lose so easily to Arima-san’s replacement?”   
  
“That kind of pride is worthless.”   
  
“Mm, it’s worth nothing, worth zero…” There was even a time where they came to blows and Ui fought seriously with the intent of killing both him and Take. Yusa’s life had been one of much regret up until this point, he simply held his head down and did what he was told. He was no better than a lamb being led to the slaughter. His quiet and gentle personality meant nothing, as he killed quietly, killed gently too. Even when he betrayed the CCG and stood on the opposite side of Ui fighting him, he was not sure if he was doing it because he believed it was the right thing to do or because he wanted the world that Arima wanted. Even though he had no idea what Arima wanted of him in the end. He was born wrong, and made wrong choices along the way, and even his time in Zero Squad was more of the same. He was told he would be given freedom as a CCG investigator if he did well, but it was the exact same kind of faceless, silent killing he did when he was a garden child.   
  
Yet, in a life of being strung along by false promises, by being told he should be grateful for what little was given to him the only time that felt real to him was when he was together with everyone in zero squad. When he was with Rikai, Shio, and when Ui was together with Hairu, Arima with Take. He was sure that Ui was being moved by the same feelings too. They had formed an attachment to each other beyond their work. They should have realized much sooner, that they wanted to be together outside of the bounds of the CCG. They should have all left together.   
  
Maybe it was too late now, Zero Squad was already in pieces even six years ago. However even if the people were not there, their impact still remained. It was because of his short time on Zero Squad that Yusa was able to feel like a person for the first time. Life was breathed into his body that was nothing more than a corpse waiting to happen.   
  
He was happy he had those memories within him, making him human. However, he did not want to cling to the past either, because in the past everything went wrong. This time he wanted to do the right thing, they should have all left the CCG together, this time Yusa would make sure they could.   
  
  


They were going to live, and he was going to live, precisely because the world had told him so many times that it was wrong for him to live. That was the reason he drew his sword. He felt sorry for Arima’s grand aspirations, the world he envisioned. Even though they shared the same name, in the end Yusa was too small and too quiet an entity to carry it out. He was a disappointment to the Arima named he supposed, but being crushed his entire life with those expectations he was almost relieved to be a disappointment. The only reason he could raise his blade was his selfish desire to live.   


Juuzou jumped back and Yusa stepped forward blocking Ui with his whole body now. The rest of the room simply watched as if they were stunned by the standoff. All except Uta, who just looked like he wanted some popcorn.   


When Ui reached for the console however and lost his arm, his blood had splashed onto the glass tank itself. It was like dripping blood into the maw of a sleeping beast. The next moment sleeping inside, Kamishiro Shachi woke up. He burst through the glass wall of the tank shattering it. As water drained at his feet he entered the combat, one step, and then two, he stood in the middle of them.   
  
Juuzou spun his scythe back adjusting his guard, but did not anticipate the next move. Rather than engage him outright, Shachi raised his foot and then stomped on the ground with everything he had. The shockwave sent what looked to be a wave through the concrete, before cracks sprouted in every direction and the floor shattered into chunks of concrete flying apart from each other.

  
Uta, Yusa, Ui, Hajime, Furuta, Juuzou, Hairu, they all fell into the darkness below as Shachi had destroyed the floor on the bottom level, the only one prepared for the fall was Shachi himself.

💀

Yusa woke up in a dark corridor filled with dust. He figured he must have fallen into some part of the tunnels that ran underneath Cochlea, perhaps they were in the employee maintenance tunnels. His body shook with past anxiety as suddenly he remembered that once Arima Kishou had fought to the death in these same hallowed halls.   
  
Even if he carried the same name and came from the same place though, Yusa did not want to end like that. He wanted to escape the life he currently lived by any means other than death. He shut his eyes trying to forget the memory of the beautiful white Arima, the aged silver, passing along peacefully, and remember his wish to grow ugly, to live his life and thrive in the chaos.   
  
As he closed his eyes his ears picked up a movement behind him, like the sound of of a blade slicing so cleanly it cut apart the air itself it traveled through. He turned his head back opening his eyes slowly as he did seeing that there behind him was Juuzou jumping through the air with his scythe swinging back from behind his shoulder.

They had fought together so many times, but Juuzou really did not hesitate at all. He looked like a beautiful doll jumping through the air, that is he looked as inhuman as a doll. Suddenly, Yusa’s vision divorced from reality again as if he would not accept the image of that blade coming towards him. As if he just wanted to reject or deny the reality in front of him to make it go away.   
  
He saw zero squad sitting a table together. They were all eating melon bread, all happy. The suddenly they were replaced with dolls. Hairu, Arima, Shio, Rikai, Ui, Take, Himself, all dolls, that was how fragile they had been all along. Their smiles were gone from their faces and slowly their heads rolled off. Hairu, Arima, Shio, Rikai one by one their heads slowly rolled off of their shoulders and onto the floor. There was nothing he could do but sit and watch from his seat at the end of the table. Yusa’s happy expression slowly turned to one of pure horror. Then his own view of the world inverted, as he realized his head was about to roll off too. He thought everyone around him was fragile and he was the only one strong enough to survive, but he had been the most breakable all along. No, he was already broken he simply did not realize it yet. Falling, falling, falling, his head was going to fall off cut clean from his shoulders just like that, just like he had watched Shio and Rikai from afar when Hajime killed them and did nothing about it because he was too busy fighting.   
  
That was all he was doing, only fighting, he had wasted his whole life doing that and then his head was going to roll off and his life was about to end. He could not even see his life flash before his eyes because he had never even lived a single moment before this point. He was going to suffocate within the shell of the egg.   
  
Then suddenly from behind Juuzou a rinkaku tentacle extended rushing straight for his neck. Juuzou was forced to swing his scythe back to use the momentum to shift himself around in the air to avoid it. Yusa like a mouse used the opening he had been given to scamper on the ground away from danger. He picked up his quinque which had fallen away and took a stance as he stood up taking hold of it.   
  
“Sup.” Hajime said casually, his black shirt torn and a kagune limb snaking its way out of his back.   
  
Juuzou’s eyes went cross for a moment, as one of them squinted at the other looked on normally. “Do I know you? There’s something familiar…” S3 and the Oggai squad had worked together on several missions when Furuta was in charge of the CCG six years ago.

  
Hajime smiled his perfect smile, the only thing that was unchanging about his face. “What does it matter? I fight like a ghoul now so you can kill me right, ghoul investigator? Let’s have some fun.”

  
“Is that so?”   
  
“Still, this fight is kind of pointless, just more kids fighting against other kids.”   
“I’m an adult now.” Juuzou said.   
  
“No you’re not, just an overgrown child. You don’t know any better. Haha. How sad.”   
  
“Whatever.” Juuzou said in response.   
  
Schwing.   
The moment Juuzou landed he instantly switched to a throwing stance, three of his knives in between his fingers were soon cutting their way through the air where Hajime was standing a floor above them.   
  
Hajime took the knives straight on in the face as he jumped down. His teeth were completely undamaged. By the time he landed, he was already wearing a new face. He plucked the knives away and sent them flying back at Juuzou.

Even if Hajime was smiling like always, Yusa felt each knife that stabbed into him like it was stabbing into himself. Hajime had given up living for the sake of revenge because of him. Yusa hoped Hajime would not give up on everything else too.

  
Juuzou rushed forward and stabbed him under his chin, going for the flesh which connected his neck to his face. Hajime took that, staggering backwards. Juuzou’s foot stepped forward in his slipper not relenting one bit.   
  
He changed his grip on his scythe to grip it with two hands again, and then unleashed eight strikes in a row. His fingers, his knuckles, his wrist, his arm, his shoulder, his neck, his ribs, his waist, his knees, his leg, his toes, Hajime felt them all cut again and again, as his body was sliced apart by Juuzou’s scythe.

  
“He isn’t fighting back…”

Hajime staggered backwards grabbing at his face as all over his body, little red needles stitched his wounds back together.

  
“Stop it, Hajime! Stop showing off! Why are you like this?”   
  
Yusa already knew the reason why. He picked up his quinque and rushed Juuzou to stop the slaughter. Juuzou swung his around in a wide arc cutting several of the support columns that were already half destroyed, forcing Yusa to jump backwards.

Suddenly from Hajime’s still healing body, a great rinaku arm burst out. It looked hollow and cavernous, and each of the holes running along the sides of the kagune opened into a mouth with a set of shiny white teeth exactly like Hajime’s. One of those mouths snapped at Juuzou the tongue barely scratched his leg as he jumped up into the air.

Juuzou turned his attention to focus on Hajime. He left forward again and swung a wide arc with his scythe. A red seam opened up in Hajime’s chest, and a moment later as it filled itself in several teeth appeared in that same wound. They bit down hard on Juuzou’s scythe not letting him escape. “Yusa!” Hajime cried out.   
  
Yusa rushed forward and slammed his sword down, cutting into Juuzou’s shoulder. The teeth in Hajime’s wound gnashed their mouths together and broke apart his scythe, but neither boy thought that it was over.   
  
“Why are you taking so may hits…?” Yusa asked, on the opposite side of Juuzou.   
  
“I’d love to show how much stronger I am then the famous dragon general.” Hajime said, boasting in an empty manner. “But… you don’t actually want to fight this way do you?”   
  
Just as when Yusa had convinced him not to fight for his grudge against Kaneki anymore and let go, Hajime was doing this for his sake again. Yusa felt even more pressure to survive right now. Unlike Arima, he did not want to leave all the people that believed in him right now alone in this world.   
  
They both swung, Yusa in an upward arc and Hajime lashing a kagune arm like a whip at him, but Juuzou quickly touched the spot at the back of his neck. Armor burst forth, as if it were devouring his body as he was quickly covered by a pitch black quinque. Two tails shot out from the end of the armor slashing at both Yusa and Hajime.   
  
Hajime was kicked aside, and Yusa had to bend his whole body to dodge the upward arc coming at him. When his hips were bent almost all the way and his head was practically sideways, he sprung up once more to see Juuzou raising two quinque claws at him.

  
“By now Arima was a special class. You’ve had six years but you haven’t caught up to him at all.”   
  
Yusa moved holding his quinque with both hands even putting one on the blade to block Juuzou’s downward strike at Hajime. Juuzou followed up by swinging in a wild arc, forcing Yusa to contort his body again to dodge.   
  
“You don’t fight anything like him.”   
  
His two claws caught on Yusa’s katana, and he chained a series of blows exactly as he had with Hajime, forcing Yusa back and back, his heels dragging across the ground. Until the quinque blades were at his neck.   
  
“Shut… Up. I’m not Arima… and, you aren’t either.”

As he heard the sound of metal crashing against metal again and again, Yusa was reminded of how much he hated metallic noises. When he was much younger than this Arima taught him how to fight. He was a relentless teacher, who worked everyone around him to death and never gave out the faintest of praises. Damned by faint praise. Yusa thought of that phrase a lot. The only reason he could take such a one sided onslaught right now, a total beating by Juuzou was because he had those memories of the past.   


Arima swung his blade again, again, again, cut, cut, cut, slash, slash, slash, forcing Yusa to defend. He told Yusa no ghoul would ever let up, so Arima would not let up either. Yusa had to hold a sword until his hands started to bruise, until he collapsed on the ground crying. The only response Arima had then was two words. “Get up.”

Yusa did not like any of it. He hated the sounds of metal. The smell of blood. Loud noises. Fighting. The bruises that appeared on his body. The cuts that he had to wait to heal. Working himself until he vomited. Vomiting because he could not stand the stench of blood after he killed. And then slowly, slowly, feeling his body become numb as the horror of his situation went away and he simply became used to it.

  
What stopped them was not Juuzou, or Uta. Nimura Furuta who had been bandaging Ui’s body in the corner finally spoke up.   
  
“I’m sorry, this is because I lost my arm.” Ui muttered as Furuta finished pulling the knot so tight that nothing else would circulate to Ui’s stump of an arm.   
  
“You’re such a sap. Don’t apologize for getting your arm cut off idiot.” Furuta then looked to the rest of the fight unfolding in front of them. “Hey, Juuzou! What is that armor called?” He recognized the sight of his own kakuja covering Juuzou’s body now.   
  
“Dragon Armor.”   
  
Furuta raised a finger and pointed, breaking into laughter. “Pffffffffthaaahahahahahaahaha! I knew they were going to name it something stupid! That’s ridiculous! You’re going to kill a couple of kids wearing dragon armor. You really are the next Arima, sooo stupid!”

  
Hajime on the ground joined in on the laughter as well. The kagune that sprouted like tree branches from his back gnashed their teeth together and chuckled, calling out in different voices. “Hahahahahaha!! Soooo laaaaaaame! Uncooool!”

Hajime said with a smile. “You don’t care one bit about the person on the other side of your blade do you, even if you’ve fought with them in the past, or know who they are.”  
  
Juuzou hesitated, still holding a claw at Yusa’s neck. “What are you talking about?”

  
“Arima… hated killing, Juuzou. Not just ghouls. Not just humans. He thought that all killing was wrong.” This was the way Yusa had wanted to fight, that was why Hajime had refused to fight seriously until this point. He just wanted to talk to Juuzou, the person who called himself the second Arima.  “He considered a career in getting rewards, promotions and merit in the CCG by killing the worst life possible. He was never given a choice in life and was forced to kill and take away precious life over and over again. Kaneki Ken didn’t kill Arima, for Arima his life spent killing was so horrible he took a blade to his neck and ended himself.”

  
“So you really are Arima’s perfect successor.” Furuta said leaning against the broken wall and letting Ui lean on his shoulder. “You don’t give a damn about life at all. You just kill whatever Marude points you at. That’s what the CCG really wanted from you all along, that’s the only reason they took you in. Hey, hey, how many good boy points will Marude give you when you kill Yusa and Hajime?”   


Juuzou’s fingers started to tremble, underneath his jagged pitch black armor.    
  
Yusa’s own fingers loosened. He dropped his sword and kicked it across the ground. “Juuzou, do you see the flowers? Arima said he saw a new flower bloom every time he killed someone, like they were flowers being left at his grave. He told me that. He hated killing up until the end. Arima wouldn’t want anybody to take his place in this world.” If he was going to carry the same name as Arima, if he was going to carry his legacy than that was the way Yusa wanted to carry it.   
  
“I can’t let Furuta live... If I fail all those lives will become my responsibility.”   
  
He dropped the claw at Yusa’s neck and Yusa grabbed his own neck, letting his breath out in relief. When he saw Juuzou turn his sights on Furuta, Yusa jumped in the way again this time only having his body to defend.   
  
“Suzuya, Furuta grew up exactly like you did. He was forced by ghouls to kill, the same ghouls that were supposed to raise him only cared about him as a toy to kill others. If Shinohara had not reached out to save you could you say you would have ended up different than him?”

“But no one did, and he’s too far gone by this point.”  
  
“Suzuya. If you want to grow up, then you have to do more than just reform past the time when all you ever did was lash out and try to destroy the world around you. You have to be what Shinohara was to you, to other people. You have to make sure children who are just like you don’t get abandoned. You have to stop the world from making more children like you.”   
  
Yusa was only talking about himself. He thought Suzuya might be able to see those feelings though, because in that moment both of them saw the flowers together. Drip, drip, drip, Juuzou looked to his claw covered hands and saw blood dripping off of them and onto the flowers below, turning them from white to red.

  
“Koori. I’m sorry about your arm.” Juuzou said, looking for where Koori was trying to stand up clutching at his shoulder.   
  
“It’s okay, we can be prosthetic buddies after this.” Ui said, before biting down on his tongue to stop himself from making a pained noise.

Juuzou looked down at his hands still. Then he saw the same mouths that had appeared on Hajime’s kagune, appearing in the gaps of his armor. Blood fell into them, and suddenly the plates of the armor itself began to move on their own.

  
“I thought I was eating them, but I’m being eaten…”   
  
Like the armor was thirsting for blood itself, it began to chomp on his own skin. Juuzou felt no pain at all, and did not cry out, but he knew something was wrong because of the empty feeling that was spreading out for him.   
  
He reached out a hand to Yusa. Yusa quickly rushed over to him, picking up his sword once more he began to hack away at the kakuja armor that was devouring him from the outside in. Scales, plates, and bits of dead and harvested but still life like kagune flew away, as Yusa tried to break him free from the armor. He moved his fingers in between the plates and then pulled them apart exerting all of his strength to do so.

A few minutes later, Yusa’s hands were covered in blood and cuts, and Juuzou was resting in a pile of his own broken armor. “It’s probably wrong to use armor that’s harvested by ripping the flesh off a ghoul like this…” Yusa said, through labored breaths. When he saw Juuzou laying peacefully among the flowers like that, Yusa saw a quick flash of Arima’s own body surrounded by flowers and shook his head.

“That was wonderful. Good for you, puppet without strings.” Uta said, appearing from the shadows.   
  
“You could have given us a hand.” Yusa complained.   
  
Uta began clapping with his two hands.   
  
“I don’t like you.” Yusa muttered. He looked back to UI. “Hairu is still missing, she could have fallen to anywhere and where is Shachi?”   
  
“He didn’t stay with us for a single second. The moment he was free he went to go find Rize.” Furuta said, looking further down the pitch black tunnel that awaited them.

💀

Kamishiro Rize was reading her book quietly in her cell when suddenly, Kamishiro Shachi punched through the wall.

  
She did not put her book down.   
Instead the girl pressed the book to the bridge of her nose to cover up whatever expression she might be making. “Oh, you’re not dead. You’re way too stubborn, old man.”

  
“You’re the stubborn one.” Shachi said, as if he was trying to start an argument. He did not see the current Rize, but the short haired one he had known in the past, using her kagune with wild abandon while blood pooled at her feet.   
  
“When I was in that dark room…” Rize began, she spoke so softly that she was surprised by a moment by her own voice. “I begged for you to come save me over and over again. How weak. How pitiful. You were never there once.”   
  
“I was there. You were too out of your mind to see me, but I was always there.”   
  
When the two of them were on the run from the CCG on their own. Shachi slept next to her every night even when she had no idea at all who he was. He listened to her complain about her hunger again and again, and got used to sleeping in the light because Rize could not stand to be in a dark room.   
  
“I didn’t need you. I don’t need you now!” Rize said, kagune forming from her back. She lashed out again just like she always did. The many scars on the wall proved that. Her kagune raked against his chest, leaving a mark diagonal across it.

  
In the past when she acted like this, all Shachi could do was yell at her to know satiety. He had no idea what was broken inside of her, she never once told him of the place he came from, but he loved her anyway. His love never reached her. Rize only did as she wanted. She killed as she liked for no reason at all. She brought the CCG down on the sixth ward, and barely even seemed to care when he surrendered himself for her sake. She was happy as long as she could keep killing. Those momentary distractions were all that she could fill herself up with. She was empty otherwise, she became bored quickly.   
  
She needed to prove that she was so strong she could never be able to be dragged back to that place. She believed she could do as she liked, as long as she was strong. Rize devoured what was around her, because she could not eat the person she truly wanted to eat.   
  
She wanted to eat the little girl standing all alone in that garden. The girl who could not do anything, the girl who was helpless, if only she could devour that girl and make her disappear. She ran away from the garden, but no matter where she ran as long as blood dripped from her kagune, those flowers would bloom at her feet.

  
She wanted to be the snake that got humans evicted from paradise. She wanted to sin and soil the garden. She wanted to be thrown out of eden never to return. She would do anything to stop being that girl, to prove that she was no longer like that pure white innocence, she just wanted to never stand in a garden again.   
  
She was happy to see Shachi, she really was, but Rize had no idea… if that happiness was truly hers, or it belonged to the little girl standing in the garden, the one Shachi had saved so long ago.   
  
She wanted to become the type of inhuman ghoul that would terrify that girl, make that girl run away from her, but no matter how much she tried every time she looked over her shoulder she saw that girl standing behind her, dressed in all white, haunting her like a ghost. Then Rize would be reminded again how hungry she was. In the afterlife tantalus was punished by always being hungry and having food just out of reach. The real punishment was having all the food in the world, eating from it and still not being full.   
  
She had the love she was denied as a child too, but she could not fill herself up with it. That too, was something she just became hungry for, more and more.   
  
Then suddenly Shachi reached out for her head, and with no anger at all pulled her head towards his bleeding chest. His blood got on her face and in her hair, it felt warm. “Rize, don’t run away.”   
  
“Ugh, I’m so tired of your advice, life isn’t a martial arts B movie. I don’t care about what the right thing to do is...”

  
She only did what was wrong.   
She killed for fun.   
To prove a point to herself.   
Stupid reasons like that.   
  
“You’re selfish until the end. If all you can ever do is for yourself then fine, but you should act like you truly love yourself then… if you run away from yourself you’ll get lonely. The past chases you, because it’s lonely.”   
  
“Lonely…?”   
  
What did she care about such a thing, that was just another restraint, she wanted to cut everything that tied her down, even if it meant cutting her ties to herself.

“You never told me what was bothering you, selfish brat, you took it out on everybody else. If you try to handle it alone, you’ll make the same foolish decisions over and over again. If you really are strong, then bear it… tell me about your past, your present, every hellish thing. I’ll listen to you-”  
  
“I don’t want to hear it again! I don’t want to go back to that dark place!”   
  
RIze screamed in self defense.   
  
Still Shachi did not let go of her. “You’re a foolish girl who only thinks about herself, but to me you’re still a child. You have to learn to see yourself that way too. If you don’t want to go to that dark place, then don’t lock that little girl away there too.”   
  
Rize saw her.   
A small girl in a white robe. She was grabbing at her sleeve trying to get her attention. Desperate, begging, child, pathetic, she wondered how long she was there, Rize wanted to raise her hand and strike the child away from her.   
But Shachi would never do that.   
  
Rize collapsed against her father’s chest. “Don’t leave me alone…”

  
“You’re the one who ran away from me.”   
  
“D-don’t leave me…”

  
Shachi picked the girl up, carrying her like a princess. “I won’t.”

  
💀

  
Ui saw a pink haired child running down the hallway.   
  
He took off after her, running ahead of the group. Even though without his arm his body felt light, like a more than significant part of him was missing.

As they descended, concrete surrendered itself to flesh, as living kagune smelling of blood and leaking fluid had fused with the wall, and tunneled into it like tree roots. He ran deeper and deeper down the corridor chasing the pink haired child.   
  
Even if she had betrayed him now.   
Even if he had lost his arm because of her. Even if she did not love him back, did not want to be saved by him. She went on to kill people. She enjoyed killing. She killed for a stupid reason like wanting praise.   
  
Ui knew all of those things and yet he still chased after her, because Hairu was not always the dancing blade of the CCG cutting her way through ghouls. She was once a little girl standing in a flower field. She was so touch starved, that someone touching her face for the first time meant the entire world to her.   
  
The only connection she had was that boy’s hand on her head. She had once been that child, and nothing that had happened to that child after that moment was anything that Hairu deserved. That was why Ui rushed after her through the field of flowers, flowers growing on the wall, the floors, all around him, until he felt like he was surrounded by flowers.

Up above in Shachi’s arm, Rize’s red eyes fell on him.   
  
“That poor bowl cut.”   
  
“Hmmm?”   
  
“There’s a dragon core running underneath this prison, I can sense it. Do you know why… dragon revived us? It’s because it needs intelligent beings to serve as its cores, it only revived her so she could be used as a spare, and look where she’s fallen.”

  
The hallway ended and dropped into a great clearing.   
  
Hairu Ihei had fallen above, and was sitting in the center of a flesh looking flower. Ui reached up to her, but at that exact moment the flower swallowed her up, its petals closing. Suddenly, all around them the walls began to shake as if there was a great serpent tunneling through the earth itself.   
  
Furuta, Hajime, Yusa and Uta finally caught up.   
The walls gave birth to dragon orphans, which crawled out of them. They were surrounded on all sides, until the heads of two of them were lopped off from behind.   
  
“What took you so long slow pokes?” Shio Ihei asked, holding two daggers in his hands not realizing the gravity of the situation at all.   
  
“Don’t tease them.” Rikai lectured.   
  
“Awe, but they were taking forever. I’ve had to wait down here in the tunnels the entire time it’s so booooring. I got so bored that I went and stole some of the poison anyway.” Shio said, holding a cannister up in the air. “I’ve been passing the time thinking what kind of kagune Yusa will grow, it won’t be as cool as mine of course.”

“Hairu… what happened to Hairu!”

  
“She’s been reabsorbed by dragon, she’ll become one of the cores so one of the dormant seven other heads can wake up again.”   
  
Rize called from above.   
  
Ui’s eyes emptied out. She had been right in front of him again. She had been alive, her cheeks flushed with pink, warm to the touch.   
Hairu.   
I lost you again.   
This time it’s for good.

Suddenly, the earth above them cracked. At first they thought it was the movements of dragon, but the kagune that were boring through the earth above them were pure white. They broke through first, massive in size, white crosses which were connected to six arms of rinkaku kagune which all together looked like a set of wings.

“Marude told me to come down here and suppress dragon activity but I had a feeling,” Kaneki Ken descended from above, landing parallel to them. “I always knew that I would see you again.”

  
Kaneki greeted Furuta like an old arch nemesis. Furuta had none of it. “Ugh, just when I thought this couldn’t get any worse.” He threw his hands up in the air.

  
Above them, the flower that had swallowed up Hairu bloomed again. Petals danced around her sharp as razors and were shot forward. The air filled with a poison mist. Dragon orphans began to be born again as kagune like roots branched out further and further into the concrete threatening to swallow up the entirety of Cochlea.   
  
“This is why it was dangerous for those who were revived by dragon to walk around Tokyo. Their kagune can fuse with it like Rize and Shikorae did. You should have listened to Marude, Ui.” Kaneki cried out. “You put all of Tokyo at risk, because you were fooled by Furuta again.”

  
“You’re not giving him enough credit. Koori can make foolish decisions all on his own.” Furuta said.   
  
As Kaneki took a step forward, Yusa raised his blade first. “Just like with Juuzou, I’ll protect you Koori-senpai so don’t-”   
  
Before Yusa could finish, he was picked up by the back of the neck. With his burned hand, Furuta lifted up Yusa and then tossed him down a level below to where Shio and Rikai were waiting for him.

“You go with him too, Hajime.”

“Is that an order, boss?”  
  
“I was a pretty terrible boss. I only used you, you know.” Furuta said, looking back at him.   
  
“Yeah, but you were the only one who admitted it.” Hajime jumped down to where Yusa was, parting on that note.   
  
“I don’t really understand what you’re doing.” Uta asked.   
  
Furuta shrugged. “I don’t understand it either. If you’re looking to see the moment my switch gets flipped, or my heart grows three sizes, you’re watching the wrong show.”

  
“You said you didn’t believe others were capable of change. Least of all you didn’t think you could change either. Doesn’t that make you more like your older half brother than you were willing to admit?”   
  
“Is this really the time?”   
  
“There’s always time to clown around.”   
  
“Of course, of course.” Furuta said, nodding his head before returning his attention to Kaneki who was slowly catching up to them. “The only way I thought I could move forward, was to destroy anything I might cling to. When I let Rize free from that place, I thought I might hesitate because I didn’t want to cause trouble for my mother, so I killed her. Then, when Rize became the reason that I might hesitate, I killed her as well.”

“You were really killing yourself, though.”   
  
“Hey, Uta, why don’t you just talk to a mirror. You might be better off doing that.”   
  
“Mirrors never talk back no matter how many times I try.”

  
“Yeah, I only thought about myself from the beginning. Claiming I was destroying myself when I broke others into pieces, again, again, again. That’s just pretentious. Symbolism doesn’t apply to reality like that. Even though we all came together like this, I still don’t think enough people care but you know…”

  
Furuta looked back at Uta smiling.   
  
“I did meet one person who cares, and if I had destroyed the part of Koori that cares that would have been a bad thing. I’m glad, he didn’t stop caring. I still think I was right, I don’t want to change but... I didn’t want to be right that time.”   
  
Uta nodded finally, and jumped down to join the four children. “Games without lives on the line are no fun, Souta… but I believe the opposite is true as well. It’d be boring for me if you died.”

“Like I give a damn about what you feel.” Furuta said as he picked up Yusa’s sword from the ground. “Are you still going to try to save Hairu, Koori. Even though she’s become like that?”   
  
“Hairu’s still there, she’s right there. As long as she’s alive, she can still be saved.”   
  
As long as you’re alive you can be saved.   
Don’t tell a suicidal man that.   
Don’t tell a man laughing in a noose that.   
They can start to feel hope.   
  
Furuta picked up the katana, and leveled it at Kaneki.   
Kaneki’s kagune raised from the ground and exploded outwards, knocking them both to the ground.

Kaneki looked on at the flower that was possessing Hairu. His face saddened, and tears fell from his both of his eyes. “I’m sorry, First Class Ihei. Above us is Tokyo. My wife and child are there”   
  
As he took a step forward, Ui immediately grabbed his ankle. He only had one hand left, and he was not a ghoul, just a human slowly bleeding out. “Hai… ru… Don’t.”

“I know that feeling of not being able to do anything, but we have to save Tokyo now.”  
  
“What about saving Hairu. Everybody came to rescue you when you were inside dragon, doesn’t Hairu deserve the same? Hai… Ru…”   
  
That pink haired girl was running away from him.   
She was all alone in the field of flowers.   
The man that she thought was coming to save her Arima, would kill her instead.   
  
“She’ll die!”   
  
“She took lives in the past. We can’t help it. Steal or be stolen from, that’s who we are.” Kaneki said, his voice calm. “All of this is what she chose for herself.”   
  
Koori dragged his way across the floor, calling out her name. “Hairu… Hairu…Save her.”

  
“You don’t have the power to save her, Ui. If I was strong enough to save everybody I would, but all I can do is protect those who are around me.”   
  
“Listen! Even if she did bad things! Even if she betrayed me! Even if she betrayed the world! The people of the gardens were at the absolute bottom of the totem pole! They were the ones suffering the most because of this world, but instead of saving them, they got treated like villains like Furuta, or forgotten about like Yusa!”   
  
“Seeing you is like seeing myself in the past. I was like you, once. I thought persistence had merit. That is was the best way to change the world. But just that alone can’t change anything. Without power, you’re doomed to live dependent on one another. I’ve survived this long to win the power to change the world. That’s how the world is-”   
  
“How can you say you’ve changed the world, if the people who need to be saved the most never get saved! That’s the same damn world! Shut up!” Ui crawled forward still. The only reason he was still moving was because it looked like Kaneki was taking pity on him.

“I know how you feel, that helplessness. I felt the same way when I had to kill Rize. I’m sorry Hairu, I must…”  
  
“I must this, I must that!” Furuta appeared again, slamming his kagune severing one of Kaneki’s cross shaped Kagune away. “What kind of character goes around saying I must all the time, I’m sorry the cross on your back is so heavy Mr. Martyr.”   
  
“Are you fighting to protect her?”   
  
Kaneki stopped truly surprised at the pitch black man that was standing in his way.   
  
“Idiotic, right?” Furuta shook his head. He held onto the quinque with two hands, his smile an upturned crescent moon, his eyes waning as they focused on Kaneki. “I just learned a lesson from the last time we fought. The world is… right?”   
  
“The world just is…”   
  
“The world is full of shit, as always.” Furuta decided it right then at random, if he was going to fight that should be the reason he fought. He was making it up on the spot. He was just putting on a show, a distraction.   
  
Above them, Rize narrowed her eyes watching from where Shachi held her. “Do I know that guy… he said my name with such a stupid face.. he looks familiar.”   
  
“You went out on a date with him once.”   
  
“Was it a good date?”   
  
“Not really, I dropped a bunch of iron bars on you!” Furuta called out again.   
  
“Jeez, you really do ruin everything Nimura.”

  
Furuta threw his body around like a puppet trying to sever his strings, he put on the best performance he could, he sliced through the air looking for laughs, but that was only because he wanted to serve as the distraction.   
  
Crawling forward, Ui finally made it to the flower that swallowed up Hairu. The petals closed once more to protect her, but Ui forced his fingers in between the gaps. He started to pry the fleshy bits apart.   
  
“Hairu… you still don’t know. There was someone who loved you. There was someone in this world who wanted you around. The only time I was ever happy, was when I was with you.”   


Those memories from zero squad was the first time in his life he had friends.   
He only wanted to fight for the sake of those connections he made back then.   
He thought he had to fight alone, to be strong all on his own, but what he really wanted was for those around him to depend on him more.   
  
He started to pull the flower apart with his one arm in his last burst of strength.   
Then suddenly, two great spiked vines plunged through his body. Just as Hairu started to peek out of the flower again, he was stabbed straight through.   
  
His mouth fell open, and blood dropped out of the corner of it.   
Still somehow, he kept on pulling until the flower was apart. He dug at the flesh that was holding Hairu captive, with his nails until they broke. The vines wrapped around him and only constricted him further, it was getting tougher and tougher to move.   
  
He could endure the pain though, because he was sure no matter how badly he had been hurt right now the world hurt Hairu worse.   
  
“Who… who are you…”  Hairu’s voice came out of one of the many kagune mouths like a whisper.   
  
“I came here to be with you, but being together isn’t enough. Let’s escape together into the outside world.”

“Koori-senpai.”

“I wanted to see it. I wanted to see… the real you. Once we’re there. Let’s go look at a field of flowers.”   
  
Koori’s voice grew fainter and fainter, and Hairu opened her eyes to see why. When she saw him, he was stabbed through the stomach, and begin dragged away by a rose thorny kagune.   
“Kooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooriiiiiiiiii-senppaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaai!”   
  
The dragon orphans that had been produced, the moving kagune, all of it stopped at Hairu’s scream. She reached forward to him, tearing away at the kagune that had bonded to her flesh, leaving her in nothing more than her tsc uniform that she wore like a tattered dress.   
  
She reached for him, their fingers brushed against one another.   
Until Koori was pulled away from her.   
Hairu screamed.   
A blood red tear escaped from her eye, as she jumped out of the flower of her own will.   
  


The ceiling finally collapsed, and just as Hairu’s tears began to flood out, so did a thick black liquid that smelled like kagune rain down on them. Kaneki had knocked Furuta to the grown, and pushed him against the wall the exact same way their last fight had ended.   
  
Rize looked down, and then jumped out of Shachi’s arm.   
  
“I want to torture him a little more.”   
  
As she said that, Shachi nodded and jumped down into the middle of the fight. He used a downward kick to the head as he landed, to finish Kaneki in one blow, and then picked Furuta up, throwing him over his shoulder. He carried him much less comfortably than he did his daughter.   
  
Rize saw Hairu had freed herself from the dragon core. She propelled down with her kagune, and grabbed the screaming girl reaching out for nothing at all.   
  
“I have to save Koori.”   
  
“Save yourself first, idiot! That’s who you need to take care of.”   
  
Rize was not patient enough to actually care about saving her in a delicate way, and quickly punctured Hairu through the stomach with a freshly grown kagune, dragging her away.

Shachi and Rize both jumped up with their unwilling passengers. Just then, a pitch black wave of kagune goo burst from the ceiling. Ui’s eyes fluttered awake just as he saw the sky about to crash down on top of him.   
  
“I guess, in the end I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t even meet you. Don’t worry about some stranger.” Ui said, his eyelids growing heavier. “You didn’t need me, or Arima. I’m so happy…”

Pain had blotted out all of the light from his eyes. In the place of the world in front of him he saw a dream. He was a spoiled boy from a rich family. He still wore his hair in the same bob even as a kid. He wore a button up shirt with suspenders. His parents controlled everything about him including what he wore. He had no real friends. He learned to cook and clean for himself because he did not want to rely on the servants. He learned to take care of his hair and his appearance himself because he did not like playing dress up doll to his parents. His entire future was set out for him, he merely needed to go to the school the parents told him to, inherit a job at their company, and then marry the woman that his parents told him to.   
  
One day he ran away into the woods. In the middle of the woods he started to cry because for the first time he realized he could not do anything for himself. He had no idea how to get back home. He had to rely on those parents after all, but even though he finally needed them for something other than telling him what to do, he was sure it would be days before they noticed he was missing. They were never around. While he was crying he noticed that there was a ring of flowers around him.   
  
In the center of the ring of flowers, there was a single pink flower. He reached out to touch its petals, only for that flower to turn into a girl. He found her a fairy in the woods. Immediately he wiped his tears, because he did not want to cry in front of the girl. He woke her up by touching her soft cheeks, even though they glowed a faint pink like the rest of her they were unbelievably cold. The girl told him she was princess of the fairies, but just like him her family did not love her as a child, just as a possession. She helped him get back home, holding his hand the entire way.   
  
After that he snuck away into the forest every day he could. They played together until he was a young man. One day the girl broke into tears just as he was about to say goodbye. When he asked her why, she said that his birthday was tomorrow and he was about to turn eighteen. Unlike humans fairies were never allowed to grow up, they could never leave their gardens. They would stay children amongst the flowers forever.   
  
The boy took the gold ring his parents gave him for his chosen fiancee and slipped it on her finger instead. He leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. He told her if she was willing to give up being a fairy, than he would give up being a human. They did not need any place to belong in the world as long as they had each other.   
  
Then, suddenly the girl was transformed into a human who could leave the forest by true love’s kiss. The two of them escaped on the rich boy’s horse, and they left behind both of their families. They lived in a small cottage together, she became an artist who painted the flowers she remembered from her youth, and he became a teacher who was strict with his students.

If only a story could exist like that for the two of them.   
This was the end of his story, it was much less satisfying or meaningful.   
Ui looked up once more and saw a sky once more. Above him the beautiful blue sky next to tragedy, the one he had been searching for all along, and he looked below him and saw the ocean.   
  
Suddenly the sky began to break apart above him. Below him he could tell there were corpses drowning in the ocean. So many of them were ones he had sank there. The only gravestones they had were the skyscrapers in Tokyo which dragon’s limbs wrapped itself around. He looked up at the sky breaking into pieces and knew one of those pieces would soon fall on him,

  
But Koori Ui smiled. He was happy. He didn’t save her, but he told her those words. “I love you.” He was filled up with those words.   
If only more children were told those words.   
If he could live a bit longer, he would want to do that.   
But he couldn’t.   
In a faraway city, someone died.


	14. 13+1: The Epilogue, or rather, The Punchline

Furuta Nimura and Kamishiro Rize stood on top of a hill overlooking the Cochlea. For once the two of them were not standing in a field of flowers, just regular old grass. Furuta thought that lost a little bit of the symbolic impact. Really, by continuing this story at all, he was sure he'd ruined the symbolism several times over.   
  
Now that Ui boy was gone there was no one worse but him to take over as the narrator. On the ground next to them, Hairu was sleeping like a princess who had pricked her finger or bitten into the wrong apple. She was blissfully unaware of who they had left behind, because Rize had oh so kindly strangled her until she lost consciousness.    
  
That behavior was so like Rize, Furuta acknowledged. How like her. What a strange thing to say. He wondered if the image he had of Rize in his mind was accurate anymore. He had been trying to distort her for so long, between the reckless serial killer who created so much paperwork for him to file (and burn to hide) at the CCG, and the girl in the white robe who pushed him over and then laughed at the funny faces he made when he fell.    
  
“This is your last chance to eat me you know.” He said, mostly to fill up the silence.    
  
Rize took a step to close the distance between them. Furuta had no intention of getting closer to her, especially with Shachi standing behind her like that. Every step closer to Rize was a step closer to himself. 

  
  


It was a bit like a snake trying to devour itself. The real Rize was hidden somewhere inside Furuta, and the real Furuta was hidden somewhere inside Rize. If it was not the real thing, then it was something close. Yet it was cannibalistic, both of them wanted to destroy themselves. Rize wanted to forget all about the little girl who ran away from the garden, Furuta wanted to forget about the little boy who just wanted to save his friend.    
  
They would devour each other to devour themselves.    
  
They were both liars, neither of them had any interest in being honest, even now. If they said they loved each other that would be an obvious lie, but if they said they hated each other that would be a lie as well. 

 

They had changed from who they were as children, but neither of them took a definite form. Furuta was not Souta, Rank 1 Furuta, Kichimura, or the V Agent who declared himself king of the Washuu. Rize was not the SS Binge Eater, nor was she was innocent daughter of Shachi Kamishiro, or the girl that took Kaneki out on that date that one unfortunate night.   
  


Yet, both of them had known the other before anybody else did. They were the only ones who knew each other, before the world tried to destroy them, and they tried to destroy the world.    
  
“We shouldn’t…”    
  
Furuta said as Rize finally closed the gap in between them.   
She reached out and entwined their fingers together.    
Before this could be mistaken as any kind of gesture though, she broke his index finger.   
Then afterwards, his middle finger, his ring finger, all ten of them one by one.   
Furuta kept smiling the entire time not letting the pain show on his face.    
  
“What a pitiful sight. You don’t even know how to cry out in pain, it’s like you forgot. And yet you’re trembling like this.”    
  
“...”   
  
“Hey, hey…are you afraid to touch me?”   
  
“I am.”   
  
“Nimura. I don’t want to see you again If you and I both died, and were reborn into another life, with no garden, and no memory of what happened before us, I feel like you’d just make me suffer all over again. I’ve had enough.” 

 

She let go leaving his broken fingers to hang there. She turned her head tucking her hair behind her ear. The wind suddenly picked up, causing her purple hair to whip over her shoulder. “Even if you were to die, it wouldn’t make me happy.”   
  
“I know. There’s no way for us to become happy in this life, but we’re alive aren’t we?”    
  
Furuta looked at his broken fingers.    
He showed her the genuine smile from when they were both children.    
  
“As long as we’re alive, we can still have fun.” 

 

“...You said you wanted to become an old man, right?”   
  
“Yep!”

  
“Live to become an old man and come find me again. I’ll laugh at you, because by then I’ll have figured out these dragon powers to make me young and beautiful forever. Live until you become old and miserable, and live hating yourself and being loved by no one all that time.”   
  
“I promise.”   
  
“Pinky swear me.”   
  
“Rize, you broke my pinky!”

  
For a little bit longer as if they were both under the same illusion they argued like children.    
Rize disappeared after that, saying she would live her life happily without thinking about him even once. 

  
I hate you. Those three words were her goodbye.   
I hate me, too. Furuta whispered back. 

 

A few days later, the rest of the fugitives were in the Helter Skelter Bar. 

  
“Itori, hold this camera for me. I want to send a picture to Renji.” 

 

“Are you really letting all of these kids stay here because you want to passive aggressively send pictures back to RenRen.” Itori said with a dull look in her eyes as Uta dropped a phone in her lap.   
  
He went back to posing by wrapping his arms around Hajime, Shio and Rikai. He did not look like an adult posing with the kids he was watching over but he did look like a very convincing fake.    
  
“Hey, I have four kids now. That’s four times the baby pictures.” 

  
“We’re not kids, or babies!” Shio protested, wriggling in Uta’s grip.    
  
“Why wouldn’t you want to be a baby? Baby’s are cute, and they don’t have to take care of themselves. It’s the ideal way to live.” Uta said, staring back with his blank unemoting eyes as usual.    
  
“Well, I am cute…” Shio said in a much more thoughtful voice than he usually used.    
  
“Can we hurry this up already! Shio, Rikai, Yusa and I are going on our first double date after this is over!” Hajime said, already ansty to begin. He put his hand over his face, masquerading with it. “I don’t even know what face I’m going to wear, just that it’s guaranteed to be a cute one.”    
  
“Yusa’s in the back vomiting. He’s being a total wimp about the whole having your entire biology change because you ingested deadly mutant poison.” Rikai said in a dry voice.    
  
Suddenly, Itori slid a drink across the bar letting it land next to Rikai. “You’re probably going to need one of these if you’re going to last here. Give one to Hajime too it might calm him down.”   
  
“He’s not legally old enough to drink.”    
  
“You guys just staged a prison break and you’re all wanted fugitives.”    
  
“Well yeah, maybe he’s old enough to commit crimes, and have a boyfriend,  but he’s still not old enough to drink.” Rikai was firm on this.    
  
Furuta was in the bathroom with Yusa, holding his hair back as he vomitted. It was a good use as any for his scarred up hands. After ingesting the poison Yusa’s hair had grown longer. At the top it was starting to grow in black again. He always kept his hair short because Arima told him it might get in the way of him fighting, but lately he was thinking of growing it out longer.    
  
Yusa raised his head to the mirror. He saw pitch black eyes looking back at him. Furuta knew that when he was younger, every child in the garden was taught to hate themselves for what little bit of ghoul was mixed in with their bodies, that they had to fight even harder to prove that they were still humans, that they were worth keeping alive.    
  
“Ghoul…” Yusa muttered under his breath.    
What did children called monsters by their own parents grow up to be?    
  
If he was looking to Furuta who stood in the reflection of the mirror with him for an answer, he was a terrible example, the worst role model possible.    
  
“Hey.”   
  
“...”   
  
“Hey, you.”   
  
“...”   
  
Yusa said nothing in response to Furuta’s pestering. It seemed he was still a silent boy, except when he was around Hajime.    
  
Furuta could understand Yusa’s resentment against him. After all he was the one who killed Hajime. 

 

“Yusa Arima, show me your face.”    
  
Reluctantly, Yusa turned his head back towards Furuta. Politely, like when he was just First Class Furuta who merely followed in the shadow of other investigators, Furuta picked up a tissue, and wiped the drool and left over vomit from his cheeks until they were clean.    
  
He wondered what idiot thought they were clever, naming a child raised in the garden “Evening Harvest” or “Evening Work.” 

  
They both agreed to bring a child into the world, only to be experimented on by the Sunlit Society, and raised as a tool by the Sunlit Garden. Humans were so vile it was depressing. They told their child to work until the evening and then turned around and sold him without a second thought. His father even tried to kill him. 

 

Furuta saw no trace of his brother’s look in Yusa’s eyes.    
That’s right they were brothers, him and Kishou. He wondered if that made him an uncle to Yusa.    
  
“Is it alright for us to live here like this?” Yusa finally asked. “Can I… can I live like this?”   
  
“Why can’t you live?”   
  
“I don’t know.”    
  
“Of course you do, who would know if not you?”   
  
“I… I … I don’t know what to do. Suddenly my entire life is in front of me, I didn’t think I would live this long. A lot of other garden children died, and to live I… I had to eat that poison and become a monster like this.”    
  
He was still having trouble coming terms with living, because garden children were only born to die. Yusa looked at him with such sincere eyes it made Furuta want to choke. He did not think children from the garden were capable of making such an expression. They were eyes begging for help. Children of the garden were taught that there was no help.   
  
“Even if you became a demon, or a monster, or a ghoul or whatever,” Furuta continued, unfazed, “does that really mean you shouldn't get to live?”

  
“I… but my mom and dad… Kishou...and all the others…”   
  
Furuta cut him off, “Do children have to die because their parents said so? Is that the rule?”   
If it was than Furuta should have died several times over already.    
He killed both of his parents.    
Come to think of it since there were so many people in the world who wanted him dead, maybe there was such a rule and he sounded foolish right now - that the abnormal ones, the monster who could not get along and fit in should all die.    
  
“What are you trying to say?”   
  
“Nothing really. I don’t have anything to say, ever. I just want to know what you think?” 

 

“What. I think?”   
  
“Yes. Your own father told you to die. The garden you were raised told you to die. Hsiao told you to die peacefully. The Chateau are probably going to hunt you like a criminal now. You were born at the absolute bottom of the world, you were born without a future, and never to be happy. Do you think it would have been better if you just choked on your own tongue and died when you were a baby?”    
  
Furuta stared the boy.    
The world had done hideous things to him, but there was still something beautiful inside of his expressions. Some flowers simply would not die no matter how many times they were stepped on. He was sure if Ui was in his place right now, he would have said something much better. Really, how terrible of a story, a good man like Ui died so a wretched one like him could live a few more measly years.    
  
Perhaps his father’s wish - a man who had killed his own wife and then tried to do the same to his son - had already come true.    
However many experiment he was subjected to, however unloved, however little he had left to live for, Yusa would continue to work until the evening.    
He would still grow up to be kind and dependable after all.    
But that wish…   
  
“..is so cynical and arrogant.”   
  
Parents should not be able to wish things at all from their children.   
(This is true).    
If all children raised other children, that would be for the best Furuta thought.    
He didn’t like adults at all.   
He had grown into such a terrible one.    
  
Yusa had no idea what Furuta was talking about. Only that when he finished taking care of the boy’s face, he turned around.    
  
“Uta said you were leaving soon.”   
  
“I have more research to do. I left them such a wonderful gift like dragon and there’s no telling what they’re going to get wrong about it.” Furuta thought of Ui’s corpse sinking away in the slurry of life that the dragon had drowned him in. “Who knows what else I might find in the twenty fourth ward. If I’m lucky I’ll find the original one eyed king and he’ll eat me.”   
  
“Do you think I should keep living?”   
  
“See you later, ghoul boy.”   
  
“B-but, I want to know what you think. How is someone like me living worth anything?”   
  
Furuta wondered why they were all like that.   
All of the kids from the garden, always searching for some reason to live.    
  
“I don’t think any human living is worth anything.” Furuta said, honest for once.   
  
Yusa seemed startled. 

 

“No one is really important. Everyone is just a cog in the end. Get rid of this or that cog and the next one will come to replace it in the end. So, tell me Yusa, if there’s no meaning or value to life then what will you live for?” 

 

Yusa fell quiet and began to think.   
The two of them walked silently until they reached the living room.    
Uta had left the tv on. 

Onscreen framed by the banner of an internationally important news station a familiar pink haired face was on there giving an interview.    
  
“I can’t believe a beautiful girl like you was raised in such an unkind place.” The reporter said, faking empathy. “Do you have anything else to say, Miss Ihei?”   
  
Hairu brought her hand up to her face, brushing her pink bangs away from her eyes. For the first time she had been allowed to grow her hair longer, as she no longer had to fight, just like Yusa.    
  
“I told you my name is Ui Hairu, I don’t want any ties to that place any more so I took the last name of the man I loved.”    
  
“Oh, so you’re a married girl?”   
  
“Engaged.”   
  
“Are you going to get hitched soon?”   
  
“One day. We will, together.” 

 


End file.
